December 1921
The demands of the season, Tommy, her own work, and carving out time with Richard meant it was several days before Clara had the time to do a little shopping for her own purposes. Plus, the obnoxious sinus condition she'd brought home from Europe had been driving her mad. Last winter it hadn't been so bad, but this winter sometimes it felt like each breath on a struggle.
The elevator stopped on the floor beneath her own.
"Miss Wells," Ernest said to the woman who entered the elevator.
New tenant, Clara thought.
"You got the little boy with the apple cheeks?" the young woman asked Clara.
Clara smiled. This girl in her fur-trimmed coat also had sweetly chubby cheeks, which made her look impossibly young. Clara doubted the girl was even twenty, and at the age of twenty-three she suddenly felt very old and settled.
"That's Tommy, yes." The floor below, oh no, Clara realized. "My goodness, I hope we aren't making a ruckus above your head!"
"Just a small one most times," she smiled and stuck her hand out. "I'm Ivy Wells."
"How do you do," Clara murmured. "Clara Harrow."
"I'm going to shred some cabbage on Fifth Avenue. Care to come with me?"
Clara smoothed her coat. She was going to have to brave the men's accessories store at Franklin Simon, and going in with backup seemed a smart choice. She'd tried to get Rose to accompany her, but since Rose had returned to New York from England it had been very hard to get hold of her.
"So what's your desire today?" Ivy asked as they moved onto the wooden step of the escalator.
Fiddling with her bag meant she didn't have to look Ivy in the face. "It's for my husband," Clara said hesitantly.
Miss Wells proved a very satisfactory shopping partner, waltzing into the men's floor with no shyness and procuring a set of stays not only for Clara, but one for her own man. When they went down to the fourth floor to visit the lingerie shop, Ivy acted like she regularly bought piles of silky underthings.
She narrowed in on the silk and lace black teddy Clara would have never considered.
"You'd look smashing in this," Ivy told her.
"Oh, I never buy black..."Clara said, marveling that the modesty panel would cover her stomach so well while leaving other parts so...exposed.
"You're a married woman living in New York. What are you waiting for? Daddy's permission?" Ivy asked before moving off to do her own shopping.
What indeed, Clara thought.
Christmas Morning, 1921
Since Richard expected to be woken at any moment, every sound that drifted into the fourth-floor room snatched him from his fragile sleep. This time it was church bells. Counting the bells he realized it was seven o'clock and it was doubtful the silence in the apartment would continue much longer.
Next to him, Clara snored softly into her pillow. Clara slept with a soundness he envied. Even now, when she'd struggled with some sort of sinus problem for weeks. Was it being in the city, he worried, away from the ocean air, that made her wheeze?
When he'd asked her, Clara had laughed, said it was a war injury. But Clara hadn't been exposed to mustard gas because...
Richard forced his mind away from that line of thought and sat up against the headboard. His bigger concern with Clara was that sometimes she was seized with the idea that someone watched her while she was in their bedroom. The first few times she'd mentioned it he could see it unnerved her, but slowly it got worse. At first he worried it was because of him, that some part of Clara didn't want him in her room, in her bed, but then from Kaity he heard that when it happened when he wasn't home it was much worse.
It had to be because of what her father did to her. And he didn't know how to fix that. He'd do anything to protect her, but he couldn't protect her from the shadows of her own mind.
And then there was Rothstein, and Charlie Luciano.
Richard pushed all of those thoughts away for the moment. Last year he'd been alone at the boarding house, he hadn't even moved into the little guest house yet. Angela and Jimmy had still been in their apartment. It wasn't a bad Christmas. Angela invited him to spend the afternoon with them. It was the first time he'd been confronted by linguini. There was no way he could eat that in front of people, so he spun the spoon against the soft noodles. He wasn't certain he could have managed it in polite company before the injury. Clara had burst in with a bag of presents.
That was just last year. Angela was alive. His life was working with Jimmy in Atlantic City and hoping to see Clara whenever he went to the Darmodys, or when he was summoned to the Ritz.
Everything changed so fast after that.
This year wasn't Christmas as he thought of it, with handmade stockings hung over the mantel and frosted windowpanes. It was a big city Christmas, but it was his. It was theirs. And it was important for Tommy to have happy memories of Christmas, he told himself. If he also just wanted to push aside the Christmas of 1917, which he spent in a French tree looking through a scope, or 1918, which he spent with his hands tied to the bed and out of his mind on morphine after the surgery, or 1919, which he spent alone in Chicago, well, he did. He'd thought all Christmases would be like that one in Chicago. Alone in some small room, pretending not to think about the happy families around him.
But last night he'd carried Tommy, who had fallen asleep during Midnight Mass, home to their warm apartment, and then he and Clara had finished wrapping and putting out Tommy's presents. And they'd-
Oh no, Tommy was going to be up any moment. He couldn't remember exactly when they fell asleep in the early morning hours. The thick silk of Clara's pajama top was slippery under his hand as he tried to check that her top was buttoned.
"I'm not saying no," Clara said sleepily without moving, "but I am a little worried that Tommy will be up soon."
He could feel the heat rise in his face. "Mmm. No, I..."
"Don't worry, you left me quite tidy," Clara responded as she rolled over and looked up at him with a lazy smile. "Merry Christmas, husband."
"Merry Christmas, wife," he answered quietly.
"Did you hear..."
The mouth twitch answered her question. Clara frowned, the softness disappearing from her face.
"This is. Very hard for him. Losing Angela. Not being in charge."
Clara lay silently, considering. Richard had a seemingly endless supply of patience for Jimmy. Her own patience was tattered. Jimmy wasn't the only one missing Angela. Down the hall Tommy was about to wake up for the first Christmas morning he'd ever spent without his mother, and apparently, his father wasn't going to bother to show up.
It made her own guilt so much worse, even if her guilt often disguised itself as anger. And of course, it was why she had agreed to compromise Christmas because the alternative was almost unthinkable...
And yet, Clara thought. Beyond Jimmy acting like Tommy was an afterthought, beyond worrying what Rothstein required of Richard...
"I'm very happy," she finally said. Said it slowly, like she was testing the weight of the words in her mouth. Very. Happy. Richard squeezed her hand. "I mean it. I feel guilty because I'm happier than I was last Christmas, and certainly happier than I was the Christmas before that. I miss Angela terribly. Jimmy worries me. Gillian scares me. I'm so angry at my father..." Clara's voice drifted off. "And Eli. He's waking up Christmas morning in prison, and all those kids are waking up without their father. What happened wasn't June's fault, it certainly wasn't my cousins' fault, but...I can't. I can't reach out to them because when I do..."
Because thinking of them made her feel the scratchy sheets under her bare skin and the cold water relentlessly pouring over her and the confusion from the drugs. It made her feel Eli's hand on her knee as he delivered her to that place. She swallowed hard.
"But mostly, I lay here with you or we walk Tommy to school, or Tommy and I play checkers or I write here in our apartment and I'm just...happy."
Those were his favorite moments, Richard thought. Being in the apartment with just Clara and Tommy. "I have. Everything. I wanted," he told her, careful to keep his good eye turned. Eye contact in moments of high emotion was still a struggle.
Clara absent-mindedly stroked his chest, also finding it easier to talk in the early morning light without looking at him, letting her hide a bit from her own feelings.
A few months into marriage and she knew the signs of him relaxing into their life in small ways, like kissing her more easily or the way he was with Tommy. Or even, she thought with a trace of shame, the way he refereed her relationship with Jimmy.
But there were the other days. Sometimes she could almost see him going away from her and she'd prepare herself, but other times it seemed to happen in an instant. He'd come home and it was like he was wearing a heavy coat that weighed him down and was so thick she couldn't reach through it to find him. So far it hadn't been as worrisome as it was last April when she'd almost canceled her trip to Newport for Dorothy Grenville's wedding, but enough that she was always half-waiting for it to descend between them.
"Do you miss your family?" she asked without preamble, lost in her own jumble of thoughts.
"I'm with. My family."
Clara smiled. "You, Tommy... Jimmy. You are the family I love but...I mean, your family in Wisconsin? You've talked about your mother and Christmases in Wisconsin recently."
The majority of the decorations in the apartment were from Woolworths, Macys, and Gimbels. Mixed in were the homemade ones. Richard had taught Tommy to cut angels out of wrapping paper. He had popped kettles of popcorn so they could string garlands, something Clara hadn't done since her own mother died. He'd cooked them things he remembered eating, most of them delicious, especially the ones with baked apples.
For Clara, it was important to weave all the things she remembered Angela doing into the celebration so Tommy would have consistency. So that Angela was here in some way. Midnight mass. Linguini with the red shellfish sauce. Butter cookies dipped in chocolate. All things she remembered doing with Angela since that first Christmas they spent together back in 1916.
It wasn't just to keep her friend's memory alive. Clara remembered the shock of going from Christmases at the house on Ventor to that first Christmas at the just-opened Ritz. How it didn't feel like Christmas. How it never quite felt right again. She didn't want that for Tommy. She wanted him to grow up with happy, warm memories of Christmas.
What she hadn't expected was all the bits of Wisconsin that started to weave into the holiday, and suddenly she realized one day Tommy would be a man with a family of his own and he would bring these things with him.
Butter cookies dipped in chocolate and angels cut from paper.
It felt real to her at that moment. That they were going to forge all sorts of traditions from a mixture of their childhoods and their lives before each other and the things they picked up along the way. That those traditions would form the backbone of their life together.
The blanket moving like an object possessed caught her attention, and she realized it was because Richard's hand was flexing hard beneath it. She regretted bringing up Wisconsin on Christmas morning but plunged ahead since she'd already inflicted the damage.
"I understand not talking to your family. I do. But...your sister, your father, they don't even know where you are, Richard."
Clara moved so her head rested against his shoulder. "That moment when my - when Nucky told me you and Jimmy were in a ditch somewhere. I can't tell you how that felt. Not only losing you two but to never know, to never get to say goodbye...They don't know that you are okay. Even happy."
The thought that he was okay for now drifted unbidden into her mind. What he didn't know-what she never wanted to tell him-was that she pictured him in a ditch whenever he was gone with Rothstein, or when her own darkness sank down over her. How many times had she jumped at the chance to go off with Charlie after she'd put Tommy to bed just to escape the weight of her own imagination ?
Clara knew her motives in encouraging him to reach out to his family in Wisconsin were murky. The truth was, there was a part of her that didn't want more people in their lives. She shared enough. With Jimmy. With Tommy. She certainly didn't want to share more. But out there were people who loved Richard. She thought they deserved to have their fears put to rest.
There was another, far more selfish, reason. Clara knew she was also offering up this sacrifice, offering to share Richard even more, as a way of appeasing the gods. In exchange for this kindness, in sharing Richard when she didn't want to, in sparing other people who loved him pain, she was making her case that she deserved her family.
One muscle in his jaw twitched. His family, his first family, was something he rarely allowed himself to think about. "The person. They knew. Is gone."
"Do you not think they'd like to know the person he grew into is okay?"
What would they think of his life, he wondered? Emma had found their mother soft and impractical. What she would make of Clara? Or of him working for a man like Rothstein? And his father. He'd never lived up to his father's expectations. Not when he was whole. Certainly not now.
He would never be able to explain to Clara the difference between her, Jimmy, and Tommy who he slowly had begun to believe loved him as he was. They knew no other him. Emma wanted her brother back. His father wanted the man he wanted his son to become.
Neither person existed. Not anymore. Maybe not ever.
The day before he left for Camp Grant his father had talked to him like a son, instead of an obligation. The weeks between being drafted in June and leaving for basic training were difficult. He'd expected his father to be proud of another Harrow heading off to the Army, as Harrow men had done since the Revolutionary War. Instead, his father mostly just seemed...resigned. And then had told him not to wait to find a wife, have a family, because he regretted waiting. That his father was older than his mother or Emmy knew. Richard made his mind up then. He'd serve his country, come home, marry Jenny Hastings, and buckle down to farming.
Afterward, that conversation just seemed like a mockery. Jenny, gone. Who could blame her? His own sister, his own father, they couldn't bear to look at him. He'd never expected that anyone would. He'd accepted that the girl he hallucinated while taking morphine would be the closest he would ever get to having someone want to be near him.
But then Chicago, where he'd tried to make peace with always being alone until Jimmy had looked at him across a Veteran's hospital ward. Until Jimmy had offered friendship. A job. A place. And Clara had burst into Jimmy's room.
But his father had been right about one thing. He was happy he hadn't waited.
"I wouldn't. Know what to say," he finally admitted.
"I could do it," she offered. "Just enough to tell them you're all right."
"Okay," he said, after thinking about it some more.
Clara knew she needed to lighten the mood.
"I'm very excited about our present," she said.
Richard nodded. They'd bought a wireless in a wood case for the morning room, which, belying the name, was where they spent most of their time.
"But of course that's just our public present," she continued.
"Public. Present?" he asked. He hadn't bought her anything else, because she made him promise.
Clara's hands were on his shoulders and she swung up into his lap.
She nodded and looked very serious. "Ah yes, when people ask we'll point to the wireless and say that's what we gave each other for Christmas. But we'll know that was just part of our Christmas presents for each other."
"I didn't. Get you. Anything else," he said, thinking he knew he better. He should have known she would do this.
She smiled. "It's okay. I went shopping for both of us."
Richard bit the right side of his lip anxiously and Clara suppressed the urge to giggle. She leaned over so her breath was hot in his ear before she started whispering, waiting for and enjoying the sudden gasp he gave as she what she bought for herself.
After a moment she leaned back and readjusted slightly, taking her time to enjoy the look on his face. It was something between hunger and disbelief that she'd whispered such things on Christmas morning.
"I think maybe," she said solemnly as she settled into his lap, "you do have something for me."
At that moment they both heard the creak of Tommy's door opening. Clara tossed herself back onto her pillow and they both feigned sleep as the sound of Tommy's small feet echoed off the wood floor.
"It's Christmas," Tommy shouted as he bounded up onto the bench and jumped on top of them.
Later, Clara surveyed the damage of Christmas morning with a four-year-old. They had carefully wrapped Tommy's presents in three different kinds of paper. One paper for Santa, one for presents from them, one for Jimmy. Clara looked over at the pile from Jimmy. She had bought a few of them and thought it likely Richard had slipped the rest into the pile.
"Where is Daddy?" Tommy had asked before ripping into his first present. "He working?"
"Yes. He's working. Very hard," Richard answered while Clara forced herself to smile.
"Here," Tommy said after decimating his own pile, bringing boxes to them. "Open."
Richard opened the box. A leather book full of blank pages. The first page had one of Tommy's drawings. A big square. Lots of little boxes. Three stick figures.
"Mmm. When we went to showroom of Sears Houses," Richard said.
"It don't have any more pictures because Clara says you'll put 'em in."
Richard ran his finger down the spine of the book, not looking up at them.
Clara moved closer, putting her hand over his. "We all know if I'm responsible for our pictures they'll end up stuffed in novels and propped up on the mantel. You'll do a much better job. We'll actually have photograph albums."
He looked up at her. Clara was stricken with doubt that the present was a good idea. They'd never discussed his scrapbook again after Memorial Day, although she thought they were probably in the box on the top shelf of their closet, the one he'd moved from the guest house to the beach house to New York. Other than his suitcase and rifle bag, it was the only thing of his he put in the car the night they left Atlantic City.
"Thank you, Tommy," Richard finally said, and when Tommy turned to get Clara's present he leaned into Clara and she let out the breath she was holding.
"No kissing on Christmas!" Tommy cried out and wiggled in between them.
They were the only ones in the apartment, Jimmy out and Kaity having the week off to spend with her family. Richard had offered to make breakfast the day before, and Clara had heard the excitement in his voice when he explained what he was going to make. Clara waited until Richard was in the kitchen before she leaned over and grabbed Tommy's hand.
"Richard is making us the breakfast his mommy made him on Christmas when he was little," she whispered to the boy, now understanding of what making this breakfast meant to Richard after their conversation earlier in the morning.
"In Witscotsin?"
Clara nodded.
"Is it pancakes?" Tommy asked.
It would be so much better if it were pancakes, Clara thought. "No. Codfish cakes."
Tommy's eyes grew wide. "Pancakes made outta fish?"
As good a description as any, Clara decided. "Rather like that, yes. Listen to me, we are going to eat them. And we are going to pretend we love them."
Tommy shook his head. "I ain't so that good at pretending."
"I am not that good at pretending," Clara corrected automatically. "And you best get better quickly because Richard is going to think we like them."
The look on Tommy's face was something between nausea and horror, and Clara had great empathy for that combination of feelings. She softened her approach. "How often does Richard eat chop suey with us?"
"A lot," Tommy answered.
"He doesn't like it."
Tommy frowned, considering the answer. "Then why?"
"It's our favorite, and he wants us to be happy."
"So we gonna eat fish pancakes to make him happy?"
"Yes, because it's important to him."
"Okay," Tommy said, with the resigned air of a condemned man.
Clara softened. "Look, make Richard think you like them and I'll buy you an egg cream after school starts back."
"Every day?"
"No, on Friday."
"Every Friday?"
"Are you negotiating with me, you little monster? Every Friday for a month."
"Lotsa months."
Richard walked in, and the smell wafting from the plate was not a normal morning smell. It made Clara think of walking under the Steel Pier on a July night.
"That smells so happy," Tommy said with a smile.
God bless, Clara thought and mouthed 'two months' at him.
No one heard the front door open. Looking into the living room he saw the aftermath of Christmas morning. Damn it, he'd really meant to get back home in time, before Tommy got up. Well, what the hell, if there was one thing Clara could do it was shopping and Richard was good at this. At doing the everyday things. They could handle presents, breakfast.
Besides, he had the present Tommy was going to love the best in the hall. That would make it up to him for not being here when he woke up.
"Daddy," Tommy cried and jumped down from the dining room chair to throw his arms around his father's leg.
Clara forced her social face into place, not wanting Tommy to see her real feelings. Jimmy reeked of alcohol-and not even the good stuff, but the rotgut Rothstein refused to sell-and girls. Good to know he'd enjoyed his Christmas Eve while she and Richard had taken Tommy to Mass and come home to set up Santa's visit.
"Merry Christmas, Skeezit. Santa must've gotten a little off track, 'cause I found something in the elevator."
"Santa took the elevator?"
Sitting on the parquet floor of their foyer, the front tires resting on the peach and blue Oriental runner Clara had found in a Greenwich Village junk shop, was a car that had to have been over five feet long. Bright green, with a canvas-covered spare tire, front and rear license plates, and a little upholstered seat. A Packard meant for a rich midget, or for a four-and-a-half-year-old.
"It's a me-sized car!" Tommy shouted and launched himself into the driver's seat. "It's for me?"
"Santa said it was for you, buddy!" Jimmy said and kneeled to show Tommy how it worked.
The shrill sound of a fully functioning horn reverberated down the hallway and, Clara feared, into their neighbors' apartments as well.
"Wait, the rug!" Clara called out when she realized Tommy had figured out how the maneuver the beast using the pedals and, apparently, various levers sticking out from the steering wheel.
Tommy zoomed past her, Jimmy watching with a smirk as he lit a cigarette.
Richard saw what was about to ensue and grabbed the blue and white lidded before it toppled from the narrow table.
"Perhaps this is an outdoor toy?" Clara asked as a shiny fender scratched along the freshly painted blue wall.
"We gotta go to Penn Station anyway. Are you ready?" Jimmy asked Tommy.
"I'll drive!" Tommy said excitedly.
There was no way Jimmy would allow Tommy to try and drive his little pedal car twenty-four blocks on the sidewalk, Clara told herself as convinced herself not to say something.
"Nah, I think we should take a full-sized car. I'll go get ready."
"Is there any chance whatsoever Jimmy acquired this vehicle legally?" Clara whispered into Richard's ear.
He didn't answer, instead kneeling to help Tommy open the trunk.
"Do a herd of elephants reside above you?" he asked, sprawled across her bed wearing a silk smoking jacket.
Ivy'd been surprised he had wanted to spend any time with her on Christmas, much less show up in the morning. The life of a mistress was to be alone on family holidays. And she knew he had a wife and a few kids squirreled away somewhere.
"Just a young couple with a real cute kid and I think his brother or her cousin or something," Ivy replied, admiring the way the light bounced from the sapphire bracelet he'd brought, along with hampers of food, when he'd arrived. "The husband's really something to behold."
"Should I be worried?" he asked sardonically.
Ivy laughed. "Always so gloomy! Not to worry, he only has an eye for his wife."
Clara adjusted her new peignoir so that it barely hung from her shoulders and sat down nervously on the bed. She told herself firmly she was being ridiculous. They'd been married five months! Far too long to indulge in girlish shyness.
Still, though.
She was still trying out various positions on the bed, attempting to look her most seductive, when she heard the door creaking open. Trying quickly to get into a comely arrangement, she trapped her leg in a painful way.
Her heart fluttered in anticipation. She'd been waiting for this moment. Her mind had raced around, drawing images of what she thought in her mind.
What she hadn't expected was for him to walk back in dressed in his suit.
From his expression, Clara gathered he hadn't expected to find her draped half-naked across their bed.
She sat up, her leg feeling like needles were going into it, and pulled the peignoir taut around her.
"Did they not fit?" Clara asked.
"I. Mmm. I'm wearing them."
Her eyes drifted down. "I think we've had a miscommunication. The stays are...I wanted to see them."
"I thought. My shirts. Weren't fitting. Correctly," Richard said, mostly to his shoes.
"Your shirts are perfectly fine. The stays are more like," Clara gestured to her lingerie. "This. More about packaging than practicality."
"Why?"
Clara took a deep breath and let the negligee fall open, to better reveal the most revealing teddy she'd ever owned.
Richard stopped looking at his shoes. Clara made a mental note to send Ivy Wells flowers to say thank you for pushing her into buying the teddy.
"You like looking at me. I want to look at you."
Silence fell between them, and Clara had to fight the urge to break it.
"But. You're pretty," Richard finally said.
"I'm glad you think so. Makes this whole marriage thing a little easier," Clara said lightly. "I like looking at you for the same reason."
Richard resumed studying the contours of his boots.
"In Chicago it was your hands. That was the very first thing I noticed, and then I thought about them. More than I should have. And then I thought about other things. I hardly make a secret of the fact I want you."
"I don't. Know why," Richard said, finally making some eye contact with her. She liked looking at him, but she spent so much time with Luciano. She wanted him but had her dutch cap in the morning after Luciano spent the night in the morning room.
Clara was loyal, he told himself. When she'd walked out of the morning room and pulled him into their bedroom, never even noticing Meyer Lansky standing in the foyer, she'd made it clear she wanted him. But the idea the flame was lit by Luciano, who'd already had his hands all over her back during those horrible weeks last summer in Atlantic City, and it was her loyalty that drove her to find him, tortured him.
"It's okay, I do. I don't understand why you want me, but I suppose every love story is at its core a great mystery." Or, Clara thought, do you want me simply because I wanted you? She pushed the thought away, but some part of it lingered.
"Jimmy and Tommy and our guest won't be home for hours still. They are going ice skating and out for tea," Clara continued. "So there's one mystery we could solve."
"You want. To see. Me?" Richard asked, letting his hand reach out to touch the black silk of her dressing gown.
"Very much so," Clara answered. "After all, it is part of our Christmas presents to each other. And it's our first Christmas as a married couple. We want it to be memorable, so we can talk about it when we are old and covered in warm compresses."
Well, when she put it like that, he thought, and he slid off his jacket.
Jimmy and Ernest, the elevator man, brought the suitcases into the foyer. It was more suitcases, Clara thought, than she, Tommy, Richard, and Jimmy brought to New York initially.
How long, exactly, was Gillian planning to stay?
"Take my suitcases to the master bedroom, dear," Gillian told Jimmy.
Clara waited for Jimmy to speak up regarding bedroom arrangements.
He did not.
"Gillian, Richard and I are in the master bedroom. Jimmy is giving you his room."
"Oh no, dear, that won't be necessary. Tommy and I can take the best bedroom, since after all, I am a guest in my son's home..."
"Tommy sleeps in his own bed," Clara said.
Richard watched the interplay between his wife and Jimmy's mother. After their bath, Clara had redressed in the dark red velvet skirt and blouse she'd worn that morning. They'd started dinner and then lay on the window seat listening to Christmas music on the new wireless.
Now all the softness was gone. Sometimes it was quite clear she was Nucky Thompson's daughter. This was one of those moments. The only thing he knew for certain was that Clara would do almost anything to keep Tommy away from Gillian. He wanted to offer their bedroom if it were so important to Mrs. Darmody, but loyalty kept him silent. Clara's face changed, her lips pressing together in a way that was supposed to look pleasant. It did, but only to people who didn't know her well. She looked so much like her father when she made that face. Not that he'd ever tell her that.
Gillian lifted her chin. "So used to making demands aren't you still? Even here, where no one knows nor cares who Clara Harrow is?"
The heat spread up Clara's chest onto her face. "Luckily in my home people do know who I am. They do care. And tonight I am someone who will be in her room with her husband, while you stay in Jimmy's room, Tommy sleeps in his own bed, and Jimmy uses Kaity's room."
"I suppose I should count myself lucky it wasn't me you've condemned to the maid's room the way you have Jimmy."
"Kaity's room isn't exactly a hardship, Ma," Jimmy finally cut in.
"How nice it must be, that even here in the big city, this little place is still ruled by the Thompsons of Atlantic City. Where I am lucky enough to be able to visit, since Clara, who has absolutely no claim on Tommy, has decreed that my own sons can't-"
"Tommy is not your son," Clara said, her voice still absolutely level.
"He certainly isn't yours!"
"Dinner. Mmm. Will be ready soon," Richard interjected, after seeing Tommy watching Gillian and Clara spar with growing anxiety on his face.
"What a charming domestic picture," Gillian said in response. "Since my help is obviously not required here I'll lie down until dinner."
Gillian swept down the hallway into Jimmy's room. What surprised Richard was that Clara stepped towards Jimmy and squeezed his hands in her own, and the way they nodded at each other before Jimmy followed Gillian down the hallway. Clara was angry at Jimmy, and Jimmy was just.
Well, he was struggling.
But sometimes they would look at each other and Richard could almost feel the weight of Clara and Jimmy's relationship, all the family secrets and lifetime of shared experiences that tied them together, a bond forged in part out of the silence of all the things they never talked about.
Tommy took all of the tools out of the toolbox he had found in the trunk of his car. Some of them were familiar, but others he wasn't sure about. He bit his lip as he ran his hand across the metal of something that he thought he'd seen his daddy use.
His tummy had hurt all afternoon. It started when Mema hugged him so tight at the train station and told him to call her Mama. It hurt more bad when Clara and Mema talked about who slept in what bed.
He missed his mama. Sometimes at night, he'd hear Clara walking in the hallway and pretend it was his mama walking around. But he couldn't remember so much anymore about living by the ocean. He'd try to remember the sound of ocean outside his window but just hear the cars and people of the city.
At school the teachers would tell them it was time to go find their mothers. At first, Tommy tried to tell them it was Clara who picked him up, but he stopped. Lots of kids went home with their maids. Sometimes Kaity got him from school, and she looked like the other maids in her gray dress. Clara looked like the other mamas with their hats and handkerchiefs they'd pull out of their sleeves to wipe kids faces.
There was another tire on the side of the car. A spare, Tommy thought, remembering when Richard had changed the tire when they drove from the ocean to the city. It pulled off and could be switched with one of the other tires. The cloth cover came off easy enough, but when he tried to pull the tire loose it was stuck.
"Mmm. Are you trying. To change the tire?" Richard asked from behind him.
"Yes. It's stuck."
"No." Richard picked up the wrench and handed it to Tommy. "Use this to. Loosen the nut holding it."
Clara came through the dining room and stopped. Tommy and Richard were both bent over the ridiculous car Jimmy brought for Tommy. Richard was holding Tommy's left hand and was telling him about loosening bolts while Tommy held one of the tiny tools that came with the car. Both of them were staring down at the tire with the same rapt expression, eyebrows knitted.
What she wanted to do was put her arms around both of them and start spewing utter nonsense. She held back, contenting herself with watching them silently for a moment. "Five minutes to dinner, okay?"
"Thank you," Richard said.
Clara was so intent on watching them she didn't see Jimmy come out of his room at the end of the hallway, fixing his shirt as he came out of the room he was temporarily exiled from. He lit a cigarette as he observed her. She almost looked soft, Jimmy thought, sweet in a way he never thought of Clara as being. Angela had been a sweet woman. Clara was a fucking harridan, usually, but not right now. Now she looked capable of melting.
"First, though. You must always. Clean and put your tools. Away," Richard said, showing Tommy how to wipe them down and place them back in the little metal toolbox with the same care Jimmy had seen Richard take when cleaning and storing his guns. Finally, Tommy stood up and walked into the dining room.
Richard felt eyes on him as he leaned over to put the toolbox back in the trunk of the car. A car nicer, he thought, than any he'd ever ridden in until the first time he'd ridden in Nucky's blue Rolls-Royce. It was almost big enough for Clara to drive.
He looked up to see Jimmy leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette and staring at him. Jimmy pointed his chin towards the dining room, where Richard could hear Clara and Tommy setting the table.
"What does it feel like," Jimmy finally asked, "to have everything?"