Rainey Royal

CONTENTS

LET HER COME DANCING ALL AFIRE

The patron saint against temptation sits straight-backed in an Italian convent as if mortised into her chair, and she is dead, dead, dead. Her name is Saint Catherine of Bologna, and nuns have been lighting candles at her feet since Columbus asked Isabella for those ships.

Rainey Royal, in the reading room of the New York Public Library, peers at the photo in the book so closely she can smell the paper. Her shiny hair spills over the page. Saint Catherine is not just about temptation: she’s the patroness of artists, for Chrissake—just what Rainey needs. She thinks they could be sisters, five hundred years apart. Rainey is an artist, and she
embodies
temptation.

Wisps of smoke from centuries of candles, she reads, have stained Saint Catherine’s hands and face mahogany. In the photo, the saint wears a gargantuan habit, her nut-colored
fingers laced in her lap. Rainey wears a halter top and holds a dry clay egg in one hand and a silver teaspoon in the other.

While she reads, she burnishes the egg with the back of the spoon on her lap.

In her mind, Rainey lifts the musty black fabric. She looks up Saint Catherine’s legs. She sees this: not an old lady’s crinkles but the lucent flesh of a fourteen-year-old virgin. One morning, Cath walked out on her rich foster family, with its tutors and grooms, and offered herself to the nuns.

In the cloister, Cath will never listen at night for the marquis padding toward her through chilled marble halls.

Why Cath endured that setup at all is because her own father sent her there, to serve the marquis’s daughter. There’s always a man, right? So there’s always a problem in the house.

It is October 1972, and the problem in Rainey’s house is Gordy, who tucks her in. Gordy is the best friend of her father, Howard. She remembers this: hugging her knees on the stairs one night, listening to the grown-ups in the Greenwich Village townhouse where she was born and where Gordy has lived forever. Her mother, Linda, came and went from both bedrooms without embarrassment, so Rainey grew up thinking all married ladies had sleepovers. Downstairs that evening her father said, “Gordy and I share everything.” Then a pause, and Howard’s voice again, lower, a tone she understood even before kindergarten: “Except for the Steinway, my friend, everything,” and then rising laughter.

No one wrote anything about Cath’s mother in the book.
No one talks about Linda Royal either, even when Rainey asks.

In the library, she reads how Cath and the marquis’s daughter grew up studying at the same table. When Cath walked behind her mistress in the gardens, their silk gowns swished like running water. That’s because Cath was given the daughter’s lavish hand-me-downs with barely yellowed armpits. Rainey can see it.

Plus Cath got unlimited paper and inks, being good at painting animals and the faces of saints.

“I found her,” said Rainey, causing all the library people at the long table to look up. With precise little bursts, she rips out the page on Saint Cath. The woman across from her, tracing a map onto onionskin, yelps.

“Oh, relax,” says Rainey. She packs up her egg and her spoon and the folded page and strides down the staircase and out into an autumn rain.

R
AINEY IS FOURTEEN, JUST
a girl trying to get from the entry hall of the townhouse to her pink room on the third floor when her father, Howard, thumps the sofa in that
sit down, baby
way.

She stops, rain-soaked, in the foyer. The place is too quiet. Not an acolyte in sight. Did he send them upstairs to their own rooms or out for pizza? Usually the first floor is packed with young musicians. Some are students, some strays, but Howard Royal only brings home the best. Three days ago
he found two brilliant cellist chicks—
found
, thinks Rainey, like shining orphans. The girls have been ensconced in his bedroom. Like he’s really going to jam with cellos. Half the acolytes are guys, who supply part-time money and part-time girlfriends and revere Howard in an appropriately oblique manner. When someone new shows up, they say things like, “What’s your ax, baby?” But half are girls who play celestial music and give celestial blowjobs and can’t believe they get to jam and party and live in the extra bedrooms of, oh my God,
Howard Royal
.

Rainey hasn’t heard the place this silent in centuries.

Howard’s at one end of the parlor sofa, clamping a beer between socked feet and a clarinet between his knees. He’s adjusting the reed. “C’mere, baby,” he says. “Isn’t it amazing? We’re alone.”

On West Tenth Street,
alone
means three people: Rainey, her father, and Gordy, who lounges on the far sofa arm refractive as a patch of snow, from his long, milk-colored hair to his alabaster hands. His jeans are white, too, and he parks a damp white Ked on the upholstery. Gordy Vine is not and never has been an acolyte. He is a horn player and the best musical technician in the house—even Howard says it. But Howard has the charisma. Gordy claims to be albino, but his eyes are green. He pretends to be unaware of Rainey by keeping his head down. He pretends he is not getting sidewalk crud on the brocade. He pretends to edit penciled notes in a spiral-bound score.

He turned thirty-nine last month.

Rainey shifts in the foyer. “What?”

She has a stolen saint in her backpack. Her egg is stolen, too; it is supposed to live on the Studio Art windowsill at school. She holds out her arms to show the damage she will do the upholstery. “I’m soaking wet.”

She regrets this instantly. Gordy’s attention, like a draft from a threshold, wafts toward her. He doesn’t even have to raise his head. Howard blows on the clarinet’s mouthpiece, looks puzzled, and says, “Sounds like fish frying.” Not much about her father’s jazz makes sense to Rainey.

“Get your shoe off Lala’s sofa,” she says. Lala is Howard’s mother. She owns the house, but she lives in an old folks’ home uptown. Some days Rainey can talk to Gordy any way she wants.

Gordy smiles. The Ked remains. “Rainey,” he says softly. Even his voice sounds albino. Rainey thinks of white plaster walls, licked by the painter’s brush.