Page 5 of Red Masquerade

“Vince Thornton?” The words felt strange in my mouth.

“Of course you know him,” Flora rolled her eyes.

“I don’t know him,” Dixon said, as though association with the man was an insult. “His name just keeps coming up.”

Vince Thornton.

“Who is he?” I asked, realizing I was holding onto both Flora and Dixon as though my knees were about to give out. I eased my grip, taking a deep, sobering breath.

“No one.”

“Well, that’s not true,” Flora said. She gestured to the grand party on the lawn. “It’s not just no one who can manage this.”

It was at that moment that a server swooped by us, light on his feet, somehow carrying a tray of impossibly full glasses, never spilling a drop. He stopped momentarily to offer us a drink. Dixon, gentleman that he was, grabbed two of the crystal chalices and promptly handed them to Flora and me, without taking one for himself, before ushering us on. Perhaps we really were a handful, the two of us.

The server whirled to offer his ambrosia to other guests.

Heaven burst on my tongue. A heady warmth traveled down my throat, across my shoulders, settling in my bones. Easing my tension, carrying away the strange feelings left behind by Brancato.

“Trust me,” Dixon said, his hand a grounding force on the small of my back. “Do not think about Thornton for a second.”

“Kind of hard not to,” Flora said, linking her arm with his. “Look at this place!”

The carousing of the speakeasy held nothing to the party at this mansion.

I’d lived in the city my whole life and never knew of this feat of architecture. We had attended many parties in the area, but it was as if this particular house had sprouted from the ground, growing like the forest of trees around it, to impossible heights. Ifelt as if I were stepping up to a castle. Perhaps it was abandoned, its new benefactor bringing it back to life, into the light.

Its lit exterior glowed like a palace from the heavens. Everyone on the lawns was dressed in their best—flapper girls with short skirts, straight hems, and strings of beads flying around them; other women and men in their evening dresses and suits, pressed and steamed and ironed, so they looked like they’d jumped right off an Arrow Collar page in the papers. Gelled and wavy hair, cigarettes on long holders, deep rouge on the cheeks of the girls, blending in with flushed skin from the liquor.

Many times, I almost lost Flora and Dixon, having fallen behind. I just couldn’t take my eyes away from what was before me.

As we entered the house, my neck ached with the urge to look upward, to gaze at the painted ceiling of the foyer. Cherubim, devils, angels, gods, all twined together, an image perhaps a century old but so fresh I could reach up and smear the paint. The figures watched as we entered, the devils with skin so gray it was nearly pitch black, figures with horns and tails and bat-like wings, wearing nothing to hide that which they didn’t find sinful. Their roped muscles were splattered with blood, crimson and bright against their dark flesh. They grabbed at the angels with feathered wings, snatched them right out of the sky, dragged them downward. But I could not look away from these hellish beings with fangs and claws. Snarling with delight, while the beneficent gods watched in horror.

“Helena!”

I was pulled from my stupor as Flora grabbed the bones of my wrist and scolded me like a child. “Don’t get lost! I’ll never beable to find you again,” she laughed, pulling me to where Dixon waited in the center of the crowd.

And she was right—the place was so large, hundreds of people crowded in, she could lose me in the blink of an eye.

The ballroom before us was an explosion of light and laughter. ‘Ballroom’ wasn’t the right word—because it was perhaps the congregation room, yet was so expansive it felt impossible that we were in a house, that a man lived here on his own. A massive chandelier hanging from the ceiling glittered with electric bulbs, red ribbons streaming down and across to the banisters of the grand staircase that crawled up each wall and met on the far side of the room. Each step was packed with people, women clinging to their man’s arms, the men shouting above the noise to hear each other, drinks in hand.

Flora easily slipped her grip from me, back to Dixon’s elbow again, sending me a wink.

I envied them.

Dixon was a viscount, come from England for “business ventures”, which we all knew was code for taking advantage of the money there was to gain in American prohibition. Flora, no higher in class than I, had somehow snared him at a party we went to a few months prior, and now, as soon as they were in the same room, they were inseparable. Of course, this did not stop her from entertaining other men in the meantime.

I longed for the consistency of a companion such as Dixon, of the advantages of falling in with a British man with a title—someone who could whisk me away from the city, from my mother, from Lucas.

I used to joke with them that perhaps Dixon could line me up with one of his business partners, or anyone, really, from across the sea. None of these men, not Marcel nor the other dozen I had fallen in with over the past few years, could even compare. We were all the same—new money, wealth acquired that had not yet gone very far, families masquerading as the effortlessly rich names we heard often from overseas.

It felt dirty; it felt as though we were all wearing masks, playing at being people we were not.

People we could only hope to be.

As we traversed the room, shoving against bodies jumping and gyrating, shrill shrieks and splashes of champagne littering the floor in scintillating puddles, a server swooped in, as if with the heels of Hermes, and offered up a platter stacked with glasses of all sorts. Each crystal sparkling and filled with an amber liquid that dared to slosh near the lip of each glass, but it never spilled. He skipped over us upon seeing our glasses were still somewhat full.

The room was packed from wall to wall, men smoking, some women even, the smoke curling and dancing like the girls peppering the floor. There was the sound of shattered glass, a shout, a cackle. The faint sound of stringed instruments and a horn, a trumpet, hidden somewhere out of my sight. Girls moving so quickly, their feet never seemed to touch the floor. Men slinging them around, twirling them into other partygoers, bouncing off each other like Dodgems.