“Roy told me something in confidence,” she whispered, coming up behind me to fasten the buttons.
“That usually means the other person doesn’t want you to divulge what’s being said.”
She pinched my arm, and I squealed in pain. “I know that, but I need to tell someone. I can’t tell Mama.”
Now she had me interested. “Go on.”
Finished with the buttons, she sat on the edge of the bed, looking more serious than I’d ever seen her.
I frowned. “Did Roy propose to you?” I’d be rather put out if he had, being that today was my birthday. I didn’t want anyone or anything stealing the thunder I was only allowed once a year.
She shook her head, golden curls bouncing. “He told me something frightening.”
I waited, my imagination already spinning a web. She rose and partially closed the door.
“Roy’s father told his mother that Daddy’s bank is in trouble. Something about the stock market in New York.” She shrugged slim shoulders. “He said his father is very upset.”
“What kind of trouble?” Yet even as I asked, I knew it was a silly question. Neither of us understood much about the world of finance where our father lived and breathed.
“Roy says Daddy could lose everything.” Mary’s whisper and rounded eyes sent a chill racing up my spine. Was this what the radio announcer meant last Thursday when he spoke of a recession? “And because Roy’s father is so heavily invested in Daddy’s bank, his family might be in trouble too.”
I stood rooted to my bedroom floor and stared at Mary’s pale face. “That’s not possible.” I tried to recall anything I’d ever heard in economics class about the stock market, but nothing surfaced. “Daddy’s banks are here, in Tennessee. They don’t have anything to do with what’s going on in New York.”
“Then why would Roy’s daddy be worried?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
The telephone rang downstairs a short time later. I looked at the clock on my bureau. It was half past three.
I held my breath and listened as Mama hurried to answer. Her words were indistinct, yet I couldn’t bring myself to tiptoe to the door and eavesdrop. I prayed the caller was Grandma Lorena asking for a ride to the party or Dovie wishing me a happy birthday.
The piercing scream that rent the air a moment later told me it was neither.
CHAPTER TWO
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
SEPTEMBER 14, 1936
The old diary lay open to the page I’d never finished.
No one came to my sixteenth birthday party.
It’s a selfish thing to be concerned with, considering all that is happening to so many people, my family included. Yet I can’t help but wonder if my very existence became invalidated when the world shifted that day. As though my presence on the planet no longer matters in light of such terrific loss and misery. To know that money, status, and privilege supplanted the place I’d held in my family for sixteen years set an ache in me I fear will never heal. How could it, when the evidence faces me every waking moment?
“Are you going to see Mr. Armistead today?”
Mama’s voice startled me. From my place on the back porch steps, I turned and found her inside the house, speaking through the screen door. The frown on her thin face made me wonder how long she’d been there, watching me. I could hide the diary I held, but what would be the point? She’d already seen it.
I shrugged. “I suppose, but I know what his answer will be.”
George Armistead, editor of the Nashville Banner. Six months ago I called him boss. I still didn’t understand why I’d been fired—“let go,” as Mr. Armistead liked to put it. Despite being a faithful employee since graduating high school, starting in the mail room and ending in the news office as a city reporter, I was fired on a Monday. So every Monday for the last six months I’d made my way to his smoke-filled office to beg him to rehire me. And every Monday he’d said no.
“I don’t know why you put yourself through that humiliation each week. If the man hasn’t rehired you by now, he isn’t going to. Something else will come along. Something that better suits you.”
Her words, meant to encourage, only grated. I wished Mama would, just once, kick and scream and complain with the rest of us. I wasn’t sure which was worse: my mother’s continued pretense that everything was fine or my father’s wallowing in a whiskey bottle.
I tucked the book under my arm and stood. “Mrs. Davis asked me to help her hang wallpaper next week. She said she’d pay me ten dollars.”
Mama’s eyes widened. “Sissy Davis? Oh, Rena, I hope you told her you didn’t need the money.”
“Why would I tell her that? I do need the money. We need the money. Lots of people are out of work, Mama. There’s no shame in accepting help when help is offered.”
My tone was far from respectful, considering to whom I was speaking, but I wouldn’t amend it. I was sick of ignoring the fact that our family was broke and broken. Mama thought asking Mr. Armistead for a job was humiliating. Had she forgotten the humiliation of learning my own father severely mismanaged thousands of dollars belonging to his customers? When he didn’t come home at his usual time the day of the stock market crash, we’d feared the worst. It was the only time I could recall Mama letting herself sink down into the pit of despair. He eventually banged on the front door at three o’clock in the morning. Mama, Mary, and I silently watched him stumble inside without a word of explanation about the crash, the bank’s fate, or his whereabouts all evening—although the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke gave us the answer to that question. He locked himself in the study with a bottle of bourbon, and that’s where he’d spent most of the past seven years.
“Sissy Davis is one of my dearest friends. I won’t have my daughter performing manual labor for her.”
So many words flew to my lips. I stopped them all from escaping. I’d come to the recent conclusion that Mama’s sanity was tied to her determination to act as though all was well in the Leland household. Of course, most of Nashville knew it wasn’t. People who’d once been considered friends turned away and whispered when we ventured beyond the house. To make ends meet, Mama took a job at a sewing shop in a neighborhood where she was certain her friends wouldn’t see her. That was, if one could still call the women she used to associate with friends. Most of their husbands had lost money in my father’s bank failure, and although they didn’t blame Mama, they weren’t completely forgiving either.
“Mrs. Davis simply needs help, Mama. She enjoys decorating her home herself.” I stomped up the steps and faced her through the screen. “I’m not too keen on manual labor myself, but I don’t have much choice, do I?”
After a moment, she conceded. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt for you to help a friend with her decorating. Sissy does have excellent taste. You can learn about the latest trends in decorating while you’re there.”
Leave it to Mama to put a positive turn on hanging wallpaper.
I joined her inside. A glance toward the study revealed a closed door. I hadn’t seen Dad in three days. Mama took food to him when she got home from work in the evenings, but despite being home nearly all day together, he and I rarely spoke. Not because I didn’t have plenty to say to him, but because I realized shortly after my sixteenth birthday that he somehow linked me to the stock market crash. As though the date on my birth certificate served as a painful reminder of the day he lost everything. He retreated from my world and barred me from his, with a whiskey bottle between us.