Last Night at the Telegraph Club: Part VI–Epilogue

Girls would go to the Telegraph Club to see a nightclub act, and once they were there they would be plied with alcohol...

At first, the girls would think it was a “lark,” Inspector Herington said.

She gave up on the pencil and scrambled to her feet, discombobulated and tense, thinking irrationally that it must be the police.

She had blithely assumed that in North Beach, surely, no one would recognize her.

She had conveniently, recklessly, overlooked that she would be a lone Chinese girl on Broadway at two o’clock in the morning, as conspicuous as she could possibly get.

She thought, inanely, that she had better clean that up before her mother returned.

She remembered missing her scarf after she fled the club, but it had seemed so inconsequential at the time.

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, taking a shallow breath in a futile attempt to tamp down her rising panic.

There was an ad for ladies’ hosiery on the page next to the second half of the story, with an illustration of a woman’s legs dressed in sheer nylons.

Past the International Hotel, past the gaudy lights of the International Settlement.

The neighborhood was a maze to her; some of the streets turned into dead ends, while others culminated in steep wooden steps climbing up the side of Telegraph Hill.

Russ said our parents were afraid I’d become destitute.

And then the reality of her predicament came crashing back down, and it wasn't funny anymore. Here she was, in a near-stranger’s home, with nowhere to go.

By the time the three of them sat down at the table, Lily felt almost normal again, rather than an interloper at someone’s private party.

Slowly the conversation drifted away from the bar raid, but eventually it circled back again, as if there were no way to escape its dragnet.

“I’ve heard her sing it in the shower though. She said she used to sing it years ago, back when she was Theresa Scafani, Ingénue of North Beach.”

She knew she sounded petulant, like a child, but her head was fuzzy and the smoke was swirling through the room toward the window and she didn’t care.

“Hello,” Lana said blearily. “What time is it?”

The light coming through the front window was flat and dull, making the eclectic assortment of furniture look like the odds and ends they probably were.

The sofa was visibly worn and threadbare in spots.

She handed it back to Peggy, who read it and nodded somberly.

On the pretext of taking Patrice out to lunch, Patrice’s boyfriend delivered her to an insane asylum.

Lily wanted to throw the book across the room. She was so incensed by the ending that when the doorbell rang she started in surprise.

She sat down on the sofa, and Lily saw her look askance...

There was an edge to her tone, as if she were hurrying Lily out of an unsavory situation.

Every surface in the kitchen was crowded with ingredients for the other dishes that would be served: two kinds of dried mushrooms, dried lily flowers and bean thread, all soaking in separate bowls of liquid; a mound of washed lettuce air-drying in the battered metal colander; bottles of soy sauce and oyster sauce and cooking wine.

Uncle Sam went out to the hall, and when he returned his hands were full of red envelopes. Minnie and Frankie both squealed as the adults laughed indulgently.

She didn’t want them to think of her as someone who had feelings like that for anyone, girl or boy, but at the same time, characterizing her relationship with Kath as a crush was completely inadequate.

Her father looked at her bleakly. “You’ll have to learn that sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do.”

“I’m fine,” she said, because her aunt looked so forlorn.

For a moment, they’d both held this piece of paper, like a talisman that had called them into existence, together.

They crossed the Bay Bridge on the lower deck, heading toward Oakland, and the bay whipped past through the steel girders—water and boats and tiny crested waves.

She rolled down the window to catch the breeze, but it smelled of a noxious combination of exhaust and seawater.

Lily realized she had never been this far from San Francisco before, and a fleeting thrill went through her.

She finally got her high school diploma in December, finishing it by correspondence with the help of Miss Weiland.