Читать книгу The King is Dead - Jim Lewis - Страница 17

One morning in early March, Mrs. Murphy with the red hair and white gloves came gliding into Clarkson’s, accompanying her fourteen-year-old daughter for her first brassiere, in preparation for her journey to the city’s most exclusive finishing school. She got to chatting with Nicole while the girl was in the dressing room. Now, love, a woman like you can’t spend the rest of her life working in a place like this, said Mrs. Murphy. Mr. Murphy’s cousin works for a radio station in Memphis, and he was just telling us how they were looking for a girl to work there, someone to help around the office. Maybe you should call him, Howard Murphy. He’s in the directory.—Oh, look, and here’s my baby all dressed up like a woman. Lift it up a little, honey. In front. In front, just a little. The girl watched as her mother slipped her thumbs under the top edge of her own cups and tugged them gently upward. The girl did the same.—There you go. Mrs. Murphy turned back to Nicole and unsnapped her little black clutch. We’ll take three, she said with a small smile, and drew out a carefully folded bill with her fingertips.

Thus Nicole took herself to Memphis. She called Howard Murphy: The radio station was looking for a Gal Friday, they were hiring—yes, right away, if she was qualified; she mailed a letter detailing her skills and received a phone call two days later; she took a train out for an interview and returned to Charleston to find the job offer waiting for her; she made up her mind, she accepted, and she made plans; she packed a trunk with dresses and effects, and she moved, walking through the door of her new house—a tiny little furnished place a woman at the station had found for her—only six days after Mrs. Murphy had stopped into the store.

There was so much to do, and so much that was different: the wider accent and stronger sibilants, the lights on Beale Street, the new fortune of a new city. Now she and John were two giant steps apart and facing farther away. Maybe a seam in her mind had come undone, all of her love had spilled out into Memphis, and Memphis didn’t care at all, and swept it away. But there was this: the strangest thing. She began to miss John’s car terribly, it was a helpless assignment of her affections, and she wrote in her diary that if she were to sit in it again she would fill it with tears. Then she tried to put it out of her mind; but every so often, and for a few years afterward, she would turn her head whenever a car of a similar blue went by on the street, knowing it wouldn’t be John, knowing it wouldn’t be a happy day even if it was. Still she turned her head, because she was looking for herself at twenty.