All Other Nights (6 page)

T
HE LEVY GIRLS WERE LOONY. JACOB HAD NEVER SEEN WOMEN
behave that way in his entire life. Their mother had died eight years prior, while the eldest was still a child. Their father, overwhelmed by the business obligations under which he had buried himself after the death of his wife, had long been at a loss as to how to keep the girls in check. There were four of them, each one a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, the older ones gorgeous enough to turn heads in the street. But each one of them was freakish in her own way.

As Jacob quickly learned, the eldest, Charlotte, or Lottie as she was known, had been engaged five times before her twenty-first birthday. Jacob initially assumed she was just a victim of bad luck, until he found out that three of those engagements had taken place simultaneously. During the month when the North had taken the city the previous year, one of her fiancés had been a Union soldier. With him, she had even made it all the way to the wedding canopy, but right at the moment when he had pronounced the wedding formula and tried to put the ring on her finger, she had flung the ring to the floor, shouted, “Nosiree, Bob!” and fled. The second youngest, Phoebe, fifteen years old, was a whittler—a hobby common enough among farm boys, but rather absurd for a girl, let alone a daughter of a businessman. She was actually quite talented, and her detailed carvings of animals and decorative boxes were everywhere in the Levy family’s home. The youngest, Rose, a little dark-haired girl of eleven, was some sort of genius at word puzzles. She would often speak in phrases with the letters moved about—or, equally incoherently, in odd strings of words that were the same backwards and forwards, resulting in illogical nonsequiturs like “A dog, a panic, in a pagoda!” and “Do geese see God?”

But none of them was as outrageous as the second eldest, Eugenia. Despite being only nineteen years old—Jacob’s age—Eugenia had already had a significant amount of success as an actress before the war, performing all over Virginia and even in Washington. She had been invited to perform in other places too, but her father didn’t think it wise to let such a young lady travel so far from home. Later it occurred to Jacob that her father’s real concern wasn’t what the world might do to Eugenia, but what Eugenia might do to the world. Jeannie, as her sisters called her, wasn’t just a talented actress, but also a talented magician who was a master of sleight of hand, as Jacob discovered through several unfortunate situations, including the very first moment he met her. The woman did not seem to adhere to physical laws. Other people walked; she flew.

The Levys’ home was a boarding house in New Babylon, a small city in northern Virginia quite near the border of the moment, and not far from where the Confederate camps were set up on the hillsides a few miles past the town limits. There were many people coming and going from the house at all times—including quite a few Northern sympathizers, smugglers and war profiteers—and Jacob needed no outrageous excuse to show up at their door. This time his story was that he was using his business connections to make a profit off the war, by supplying Confederate camps with hard-to-get goods from the North. He arrived one spring evening dressed in an appropriately elegant suit and hat, a great improvement over the dead man’s Rebel uniform. He rang the doorbell, sensing a buried, coiled fear rising up within him as he heard someone within approaching. But when the door opened, the person standing behind it was a little girl.

“Good evening,” she said, in her high little girl’s voice.

Jacob had been expecting a servant or a slave, though he later learned that the Levys, partly due to Philip Levy’s recent business problems and partly for quite separate reasons, had not kept a single slave or servant for many years. But it was the height of the person who answered the door that startled him. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had spoken to a child. Even though his heart was pounding, the sight of her little dark curls brought a smile to his face. “Good evening, miss,” he said, and tipped his hat to her. “I would like to speak to Mr. Philip Levy. Is he available at present?”

She curtsied. “Madam, I’m Adam,” she said, in a deep, hollow voice. Then she grinned, trying not to laugh.

Jacob had no idea what this meant, but he was hardly about to admit it to an eleven-year-old, not to mention a girl—especially a girl who might soon become his sister-in-law. Instead he smiled, and pretended to follow the joke.

“Adam Levy, I presume?” he asked, intending to humor her.

“I’ve let a name emanate: Levi,” she said, oddly enunciating each word. This time she couldn’t hold back, and giggled.

This entire exchange baffled him. It would take several more days in the Levy house before someone explained to him Rose’s fondness for anagrams and palindromes. Eager to look like he had understood, he smiled uneasily and replied, “Yes, Levy. I’ve come for Philip, not Adam, madam. Is he here?”

She curtsied, then turned her back to him in the doorway. “PAPA!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. Then, with an elegant twirl, she turned back to him.

Her scream had knocked the breath out of him. “Name, e, man?” she asked.

The question confused him. Did she want to know his name, or someone else’s? It should have been obvious, but somehow it wasn’t. He remembered the scowl of the slave at Harry Hyams’s door. He was alarmed to find himself opening his mouth and then closing it again, forgetting again, for the briefest of instants, his own name. An image appeared in his mind of the sign outside his father’s office, the name painted in large black letters, unassailable, proclaiming where he belonged, who he was meant to be. “Er, Rappaport,” he mumbled at last. “Mr. Jacob Rappaport.”

The little girl turned around again. “PARROT, PAP!” she screamed. Then she turned back to Jacob, composed her face into a very ladylike smile, and curtsied. A moment later, he at last saw Philip Levy standing behind her.

“My dear Jacob!” he cried.

Jacob looked at Philip Levy and bit his lip, hiding his surprise. He barely recognized him. Unlike Harry Hyams, who had drunk up the war as though it were the fountain of youth, Philip looked dramatically older than Jacob remembered him, even though he had last seen him only about a year and a half before. In less than two years he had become an old man. His hair had thinned, and shone all over with gray; his black mustache and eyebrows looked darker than pitch in comparison, almost comically heavy and thick. His forehead was deeply creased, compressing like a bellows when his black eyebrows rose. The pince-nez on his nose made his face look even thinner and more haggard than it was.

But his energy hadn’t diminished. Jacob remembered how he used to bound into their offices as if not a single second of his time in New York could go to waste. Now he reached over the threshold with great alacrity, grabbing Jacob’s hand. “One of the people I thought I’d never see again!” he announced. “What brings you here?”

“Oh, all sorts of illegal activities,” Jacob said grandly. He was no longer nervous, merely curious. He wasn’t going to kill anyone, he reminded himself as Philip escorted him through the doorway of the house. The thought comforted him.

Philip grinned. Clearly he thought he knew exactly what Jacob meant. “Business is business,” he said. “I’ve been trying to specialize in that sort of activity myself.” The little girl darted into the house behind her father. “That was Rose,” Philip said, waving a hand toward the girl, with a weary sigh. “Don’t mind her. Don’t mind any of them, in fact. We were just sitting down to supper. It would be wonderful if you could join us. You’ve picked a lucky night—we have some boarders staying in the house, but none of them are here this evening.”

At that moment the little girl darted back, followed by three absolutely stunning girls about Jacob’s age, all assembling in a row in the front room behind their father. “I don’t believe you’ve met any of my daughters,” he said, then turned to the girls. “Girls, this is Mr. Jacob Rappaport, whose father and I used to work together in New York.” He turned back to Jacob. “Of course you’ve already met Rose,” he added. The little girl now stood in front of him, her head level with his chest. “And it’s my pleasure to introduce you to her sisters—Charlotte, Eugenia, and Phoebe.”

The three older girls curtsied, one at a time at the sound of their names, three dark-haired heads of curls rising and falling before him as they glanced at him with their dark brown eyes. Jacob was awed by all three, unable to believe his astounding luck: they were absolutely spellbinding, and not only because he had barely seen a woman in the previous year. He repeated their names and stepped toward them, bowing grandly to each of them, taking his time with the formalities so as to admire them a little longer. Their dresses were simple, laceless cotton, nothing like the glamorous gowns that the daughters of his father’s colleagues wore in New York. They barely wore any face powder, and their shoes were battered and old. But even in their unstylish clothes, Jacob thought, any of the three of them would have made the ladies he had met in New York envious. The three girls smiled at him modestly, one of them even blushing as Rose let out a hiccup. He remembered his mission and stared at them all in disbelief. Was he really looking at a ring of spies? He had expected some sort of hint, in a gesture or a glance—subtle perhaps, but unmistakable enough to erase his doubts—of ambition, calculation, evil. But there was nothing of the sort. These were simply Philip Levy’s daughters. And they were beautiful. He swallowed, fighting down fear.

Eugenia was the last in the row. All four girls looked quite a bit alike, even the little one, but Eugenia immediately caught his attention. Her hair was wilder than her sisters’, tamped down by at least six pins and ribbons that he could see. The two sisters standing beside her had avoided looking directly at him, but she looked straight at his face, with deep brown eyes so intense that he could not look away even if he had wanted to. She was smiling, but there was something odd about her smile. Her expression puzzled him until he saw that she was trying not to laugh.

Embarrassed, he tried to speak. “The pleasure is mine,” he said, in far too loud a voice, and then, stupidly, bowed to Eugenia again.

This time Rose, standing alongside her sisters with her father’s hands on her low shoulders, burst into giggles. Jacob turned to look at her, then at the other girls, and watched in bewilderment as all of them but Eugenia began snorting, struggling not to laugh out loud. Several agonizing seconds passed before he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror on the opposite wall and noticed that he was wearing one of Eugenia’s hair ribbons.

He grabbed at it with clumsy hands, his scalp stinging as he pulled it off his head. How on earth had she done it? His face was burning, but he knew that shame was not an option. It was his assignment to be a gentleman at all costs, even if it meant playing the fool. He turned to Eugenia, and forced a smile.

“My dear Miss Levy,” he said, as he held the ribbon out to her in the palm of his sweating hand, “I do hope you will accept this small token of my new affection.”

He was proud of this reply, and even prouder that her sisters finally laughed out loud. The chorus of female laughter sounded to him like a round of applause. Eugenia smiled back at him, a friendly smile. He looked at her, still encouraged by her sisters’ laughter, and felt suddenly at ease.

But his pride couldn’t last. Eugenia curtsied again, and spoke. “Gladly, Mr. Rappaport,” she sang. Hers was an actress’s voice: clear, distinct, presumptuous. “But only if you will allow me to repay you.”

She reached into the bosom of her dress. Jacob glanced at her father, who was checking his pocket watch, before allowing himself to admire the shadowed curve of her skin as she slipped her fingers beneath the dress’s neckline. He was still captivated by this display when she suddenly withdrew her hand, flourishing it before his eyes. And that was when he saw that she was holding his own wallet.

He stood there flabbergasted as she opened the wallet and removed a two-dollar Rebel bill, which she then dangled in front of his nose so that he was looking at Judah Benjamin’s lithographed face. “I suspect you will agree that this is worth far more than that token of your affection, even with the current currency depreciation,” she said. “But for your troubles, Mr. Rappaport, I do hope you will accept it.”

Jacob was speechless. He looked at Eugenia again, then at her laughing sisters. Eugenia reached toward his stock-still open hand, helped herself to her ribbon, and placed both the bill and the wallet in his frozen palm. “We hope you will join us for supper,” she said, and curtsied. Then all of the sisters turned, as if in a choreographed ballet, and followed her out of the room.

For a moment Jacob stood alone with their father, staring at the wallet and the bill in his hand. When he finally looked up, he saw Philip Levy watching him, with a tired grin on his face. “As I said at the door, please don’t mind any of them,” Philip said. “And do join us, if you are still willing.”

Jacob caught his breath, and once again forced himself to smile. “Mr. Levy, it would be an honor to stay with you and your very talented family,” he said, and placed the two-dollar bill in Philip’s hand.

Philip returned the bill to Jacob. “We can discuss it later,” he said. “For now, you are our guest. Please come with me.” And the two of them followed the girls into the dining room.

It was a warm night in late May, very humid, and the air in the dining room was thick and full above the long table. Dusk had not quite fallen, but Lottie rose from her seat to light two lamps on either end of the room. The room seemed to gleam in the lamplight against the deepening blue that pressed against the windowpanes, the four girls’ faces glowing as they talked and laughed. Jacob watched the family around the table and marveled. He thought of the filthy camps where he had slept and eaten for most of the past year, the mud-coated tents and the vomit-stained blankets on ordinary nights, and then the choking smell of already rotting flesh on those howling twilit evenings when he had clawed his way off of battlefields, the night air riven with the long screams of those not yet dead. It suddenly seemed impossible to him that those places and this room could exist in the same world. He looked around the table at the faces of the chattering Levy daughters and imagined that this room was a sealed compartment in time and space, with an entire world contained within it—an alternative world, independent from reality, where this house with its lights and laughter and beautiful girls had somehow, impossibly, become his home. Phoebe stepped away to the kitchen and returned to pile an impressive heap of food onto his plate, roasted chicken and bright orange sweet potatoes and some sort of awful greens he had never tasted before. Except for the greens, he devoured it all with relish. He noticed Jeannie—as he had just heard her sisters calling her—watching him from across the table. When he glanced up at her, she flashed a smile at him, as though they were sharing a secret. Jacob tried to smile back at her, but didn’t quite succeed. Sweat dripped beneath his collar as he put down his fork, wary of what might happen next.