Night Butterflies

Jackson Heights, New York

Summer, 1924

Roxana sat at her rolltop desk calligraphing her signature into the autograph books that some of her fans had left with her doorman. She gripped the ebonite pen in her hand and slowly traced the loops and flourishes in the letters that made up her name. 

Roxana de Havilland. 

It wasn’t her real name, but Rosie Winters was far too boring for a film star. 

From her window, she could see into the sun-splashed courtyard with its maze of green hedges surrounding stone benches and a tiered birdbath. The money she made from her movies was enough for an apartment in a stately brick building with spires and a slanted roof, just like the chateaux that lined the streets of Paris. The apartment had a gleaming parquet floor, a sunken living room and there was even enough space for a grand piano -- a Steinway, assembled in a factory not far from where she lived. She couldn’t play it, but whenever she hosted a party, there was at least one guest who knew a few tunes. 

Wouldn’t everyone at home be green with envy, Roxana thought, if they ever bothered to make the trip to see me. 

 In the hallway, the candlestick phone rang, shattering the afternoon idyll with a sound that reminded Roxana of drumsticks on cymbals. As she stood up to answer the call, she dropped her pen, and the black ink leaked all over the page, drowning her careful script. She snatched the pen to stop the ink from spilling and it bled all over her fingers. 

“Oh, hell’s bells,” she grumbled and ran to the phone. She held the earpiece up to her ear with one hand and gripped the stem with the other so she could speak into the mouthpiece. It was the secretary at Kaufman.

“The shoot’s off tomorrow,” the secretary said.

“What do you mean the shoot’s off?” Roxana asked. She was supposed to film her role as the heroine of Night Butterflies, about a peasant girl who is tormented by a vampire until she falls in love with him and becomes a vampire herself. She listened to the line crackle as she waited for an answer. 

“It’s postponed.”

Roxana frowned and bit the inside of her lip. “Why in the hell have they done that?”

“Wouldn’t say. He only said it’s postponed and a new date is to be determined.” 

“Fine,” she replied. “Thanks for the call.” Roxana hung up and set the phone back into the walnut niche that was built into the wall. The farmhouse back in North Dakota never even had a phone, let alone an ultra-modern shelf built right into the wall to hold the phone and its ringer box. It even had a small shelf that held the city’s telephone directory and her personal book of contacts. 

After the call, she paced the narrow hallway. 

She picked up the receiver again and waited for the operator to come on the line. 

“Can you connect me to Long Beach four five six two zero?” Roxana asked. 

“One moment,” the operator replied. 

Roxana pictured the girl sitting there at her switchboard, crammed into a dark room with a dozen other girls, moving plugs around. She was glad not to be one of those switchboard girls. 

She hadn’t heard anything about the producer having money problems; he could buy a pony for what he spent on the little glass bottles of radioactive water he always carried around. Ever since Congress passed their silly 18th amendment, he never went anywhere without a little vial of “sunshine water” in his breast pocket. 

The line began to ring. She pictured him out there in his mock Tudor on Long Island, with the oak beams that ran across the ceiling, the windows with the diamond-patterned leaded glass and the massive stone fireplaces. It even had an Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ built right into the wall. He could take on a second mortgage and make twenty movies for what it was worth. 

She listened to the phone ringing, imagining the sound echoing off of the still-new plaster walls. Finally, the operator came back on the line.

“It seems there’s no answer,” she said. 

“I’ll try later,” Roxana said and went back to pacing the hall. 

Night Butterflies was her chance to be something more than an ingénue. The audiences would scream with terror when they saw her transform from a naive peasant to a demon goddess. She had to do something. She had to save the film. 

She looked down at her hands, at the dark ink stains on her skin. She went into the bathroom and tried to scrub them away, but traces of the ink remained no matter how long she held her fingers under the faucet. 

“Oh, hell,” she spat, “I’ll just wear gloves.” 

The next day, Roxana woke up late and put on a peach silk dress with grey suede shoes. She nestled a feathered cloche on top of her bobbed auburn curls. She covered the ink stains on her fingers with ivory gloves. Because she didn’t have to report to Kaufman for filming, she decided to take a car into Manhattan and join some friends for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel. 

In the elevator, she ran into a neighbor, a tall man in a dark suit and a black homburg. He tipped his hat as she stepped into the elevator. 

“Miss de Havilland,” he said. 

“I didn’t know you’d come back from France, Mr. Harrison.” she said. 

“I sailed into New York Harbor on the Majestic early this morning. Smoothest crossing I’ve ever had. And where are you off to?”

“Just a meeting,” she said as she stepped off the elevator and onto the lobby’s white marble floor. “Good to have you back!” 

A black Model T Ford pulled up just as Roxana exited the lobby. She slid into the backseat. The driver closed the door for her and returned to his seat behind the steering wheel. 

“I’ve seen all of your pictures,” he said. 

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she replied. As the car drove away from the tree-lined boulevards of Jackson Heights and over the water to Manhattan, Roxana remembered her first trip to New York. She was sixteen and had come all the way from North Dakota for an ice skating competition. The trip had taken days: first, a frigid carriage ride to Fargo where she caught a train to Saint Paul, then another to Chicago, and then to Baltimore before finally taking one last ride to New York City. Coming from the wide-open Dakota prairie, New York’s dense streets felt like a coffin. 

At the skating competition, Roxana took third place. While she was tracing her figures on the ice, careful to repeat the grooves she’d carved with her blades, a man in the crowd saw her expressions and noted that he could tell when her face changed, even when she was very far away. After the competition, she received a telegram from a film director at Kaufman Studios in Astoria, Queens, asking for a meeting. 

Her mother, who’d accompanied her on the trip, forbade her from taking the meeting. 

“He doesn’t want you for a film, Rosie,” her mother sneered. “He wants to take your virtue. The only place you’re going is back on the train.” 

“You can’t stop me,” Roxana argued. “You can go home alone.” She took the small amount of money she’d earned as a prize for skating and found a room in the kind of hotel where the people didn’t ask any questions. The next day, she met with Alistair Harper, the film director, who told her that her big eyes were perfect for silent films. 

The car pulled up outside the Algonquin. Roxana fished several bills out of her purse. The driver’s face brightened when she told him to keep the change. As she stepped out of the car, she gave a nod to the uniformed bellman who held the door for her. She breezed through the lobby and made her way to the Rose Room, where her friends were already gathered, tearing into steamy popovers and munching celery. 

Roxana took a seat next to Alexander, a war correspondent with a wrinkled forehead and hair too white for someone his age. Even before Prohibition, the Algonquin had been dry, but when the waiter brought her a glass of grapefruit juice, the journalist discreetly took a small flask from his breast pocket and added a splash of gin. 

When the waiter returned, she ordered cream of asparagus soup and hearts of romaine with oranges.

“Don’t you ever order steak?” Alexander teased. 

Roxana winked and plucked a pale celery stalk off a plate in the center of the table and nibbled on it. Across the table, two playwrights argued over a line from Shakespeare. 

“Maybe we should ask Roxana,” one of them said. “She’s the actress.”

“Ask me what?” she said, sipping her gin-and-grapefruit. 

“Which Shakespeare play does ‘groping for trouts in a peculiar river’ come from? He says it’s Much Ado About Nothing but I say it’s from Measure for Measure. What do you think?”

Roxana felt her cheeks blush as all the eyes at the table turned toward her. She didn’t know a damn thing about Shakespeare. There had never been much time for reading on the farm, save for the Bible. She’d stopped going to school altogether after eighth grade. 

“Measure for Measure,” she said. “It’s got to be.”

“I think that’s right,” said Dottie, the woman-poet who sat on Roxana’s other side. Roxana beamed. 

Later, after the waiter had cleared away their plates and they’d made their selections from the dessert cart, Alexander asked about Roxana’s latest film. Her shoulders slumped a little as she told them about the postponement. 

“Money problems, I think. An investor backed out maybe.”

“Why don’t you raise the money yourself?” asked Dottie. She wore a cloche just like Roxana's, only it didn’t have a feather. Her navy-blue dress was cotton instead of silk. 

“I want to. I just don’t know how. What should I do?” 

Dottie and Alexander traded glances and said almost in unison: “Throw a party!” 

An hour before her first guests arrived, Roxana surveyed the apartment, making sure everything was in place. A hired girl in a starched apron had stretched the oak table in Roxana’s dining room and covered it with platters of hors d’ouvres: blue point oysters, Portuguese sardines and Beluga caviar on ice, deviled eggs, pickled lamb’s tongue, beef consomme pearls, celery, radishes and every kind of olive the grocer could find. She had grapefruit, pineapple and orange juice, grenadine, bitters and sugar cubes. Alex would bring the gin and the rye.

Roxana had invited everyone she knew from Kaufman, all of her friends from the Algonquin, and everyone who lived in her building who might like to meet movie stars and writers. Alistair Harper’s son Rex would play the piano (she’d had it tuned) and Alistair would bring the treatment for Night Butterflies. Once all the guests were lubricated and everyone had a chance to settle in, Roxana would pass around a crystal vase and ask for contributions. The filming schedule would be back on track in no time. 

At precisely seven in the evening, the intercom crackled. Moments later, Alexander arrived at Roxana’s door with a baby carriage. Roxana pulled back the soft yellow blanket to see two earthenware jugs nestled side by side. She looked up at him and smiled. 

After her first film, Roxana wrote a letter home. She knew that her family would have to go into Fargo to see the movie, but she hoped they’d make the trip so they’d understand why she hadn’t returned to the farm. A few weeks later, the same envelope was returned in the mail with the words addressee unknown scribbled over Roxana’s handwriting. Years later, with help from Alex, she found out what happened: the bank had foreclosed on the farm, and they moved to Bismarck, then to Sioux City before they finally settled somewhere in Montana. Alex couldn’t get them on the phone: they wouldn’t take a call from New York. 

Roxana came to at dawn. The morning sun lanced through the windows and made the back of her head throb. Her body ached as she sat up; she realized she had passed out on top of the piano. The crystal vase was on the floor, smashed to slivers. The last thing she remembered from the night before was climbing on top of the piano to sing “My Man.” 

Cold and wet / tired you bet

But all that I soon forget

With my man

Cigarette butts and napkins were scattered like autumn leaves all over the parquet. A tower of dirty dishes leaned precariously in the kitchen sink. The platters on the dining room table were empty except for a few pieces of celery and a solitary radish. The ice that had sat underneath the seafood had all melted and now a rivulet of water ran down the table leg and pooled on the Turkish rug. 

Roxana scratched the back of her neck as more of the night came back to her. At one point, the entire apartment was so crowded that it was nearly impossible to move and the cigar smoke was so thick, it lowered the ceiling by two feet. 

The gin and rye went fast, but someone else had champagne that was sickly-sweet even after adding the juice of six lemons, and her neighbor Mr. Harrison brought a bottle of absinthe that he’d smuggled in from Paris. He filled a glass with the green liquor and set a perforated spoon over the top of it. He placed a sugar cube on top of the spoon and poured water over it to dilute and sweeten the absinthe. Roxana sipped it carefully. It tasted of bitter anise. Mr. Harrison laughed as she lunged for the champagne-lemonade to wash it out of her mouth. 

Roxana couldn’t remember making her pitch for donations, or Alistair reading from the Night Butterflies treatment. She did remember Rex playing ragtime after ragtime. When he finally played a Charleston, the crowd erupted. 

She staggered to the bathroom and turned on the tap. She watched her clawfoot tub fill with steaming water. The phone rang. The sound was like getting shot in the head. It was Dottie. 

“Have you seen my peacock?” 

“Your what?” Roxana pressed her spine against the wall to keep from tumbling to the ground as the room spun around her. 

“My peacock. It’s a brooch with sapphires and emeralds and a little orange citrine eye. I had it on last night but now I can’t find it. I think I took it off last night to show someone…have you seen it?”

“I haven’t. I’ll look around. Should I bring it by if I find it?” 

“Please do! By the way, I’m going to write a poem about last night. It’s going to melt the faces off of the editors over at the New Yorker.”

Dottie lived on the Upper West Side, in an entire rowhouse with three floors all to herself. It was beautiful -- plaster medallions on every ceiling and gasoliers with etched glass shades -- but it was old. Dottie was getting estimates to have all the gas lights converted to electric. 

In the bathroom, Roxana peeled off her dress. As she wrenched herself free of her brassiere, a wad of cash fell onto the tile floor. She picked it up and counted: it was almost a hundred dollars. It would just about cover repairs to the dining table, the Turkish rug and the floors, plus extra time for the maid to come and clean up all this mess. 

Roxana slid into the hot water and closed her eyes. She dozed off. She woke up shivering in cold water. The ink stain on her fingers was still there. She rubbed a bar of soap over her skin but the black splotch remained. Even the ink they’d used for the fingerprinting scene in Criminelle had washed out after a day. 

Roxana toweled off and got dressed just as the girl arrived to clean up last night’s mess. She debated with herself whether to tell the girl about the peacock. Even the most trustworthy hired girls would be tempted by a bauble like that, so why tip her off? On the other hand, if she knew it would be missed, she might be less likely to run off with it. 

If I was a hired girl, Roxana thought, I’d slip it in my pocket and take it to the diamond district to hock it. She grinned inwardly. Maybe I should give that line to Dottie for her poem.

“Effie,” Roxana called. 

“Yes, ma’am?” Effie was fine-boned with pale blonde hair. She said she was sixteen, but Roxana suspected she was younger.

“My friend Dorothy lost a brooch here last night. It’s in the shape of a peacock. Do let me know if you find it.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

There was a soft rapping on the door. When Roxana opened it, Mr. Harrison stood on the other side, holding a newspaper. 

“I see you survived the night,” he said. 

“Barely,” she admitted. “Is that the Times?”

He shook his head. “The Post. You’re in it.” He handed her a copy of the New York Post and pointed to a headline: Starlet Roxana de Havilland Throws Blowout at Jackson Heights Pied-à-Terre. 

“Who did this? Was it Alex?”

Mr. Harrison shrugged. She scanned for a byline but the letters on the page all seemed to scatter about the page, like ants disturbed in their nest. She blinked hard. By Wilbur Evanson. She had no idea who Wilbur Evanson was. She scanned the copy, praying that it wouldn’t mention anything about the rye or the gin or the absinthe. 

“‘Miss de Havilland’s spread included the finest seafood on the entire east coast and consomme pearls made by a top gourmet chef,’” Roxana read aloud. “‘Miss de Havilland is starring in the upcoming thriller Night Butterflies…”

Roxana paused and looked up at her neighbor. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “They don’t mention the liquor.”

“Can you imagine if they’d mentioned the absinthe? You’d be run out of town. And I’d be hanged!” 

“I really don’t know who this Wilbur is. I confess I don’t remember everything that went on last night, but I am certain I know every person who walked through that door. Did you see anyone who seemed…out of place?”

Mr. Harrison rubbed the back of his neck and shook his head. A red silk handkerchief peeked over the top of his breast pocket. His suit was brown with blue pinstripes. 

“I can’t say as I did. But I don’t remember it all that clearly either.” 

“Excuse me,” Effie said. Roxana turned around and saw the girl holding out her hand with a tiny glittering bird in it. “Is this the pin you were looking for?”

Roxana took it and held it up to the light. The citrine eye shot a fiery ray back at her. She thought: How mean you were for not trusting the girl.

“Yes, this is Dottie’s brooch. Thank you, Effie.” She turned back to Mr. Harrison, who was leaning against the door jamb and flashing a crooked grin. “I promised Dottie I would take this to her. She lives on the Upper West Side.”

“I’m headed that way,” he said. “I can drive you.” 

Mr. Harrison’s Chrysler Six was painted a dark maroon, a color that reminded Roxana of the aging barn on her family’s old farmstead on the prairie. She climbed in next to him on the leather seat and the car rumbled as he put it into gear. 

“I like the new colors for cars,” she said. 

Mr. Harrison nodded. “It sure beats Henry Ford’s boring old black.”

She watched his knuckles as he gripped the gear shift. She imagined what it would be like to feel his hand slide under the hem of her skirt and turned away so he wouldn’t see her cheeks flush. 

Everyone already assumed she was loose. Film star, chorus girl, ballerina -- they were all synonymous with “prostitute” to some people. Roxana didn’t care what people thought, but she also knew that the things women did to keep the stork at bay didn’t work and she wasn’t about to give up acting. Not for a baby. Not for a man. Not yet. 

Roxana shielded her eyes against the glare of the sun as they crossed the Queensboro bridge. 

“Don’t look down,” he teased as Roxana watched a small boat churn through the slate-gray water of the East River. After they crossed the bridge, they turned down Third Avenue and drove under the shadow of Third Avenue IRT. Roxana remembered riding that train when she first came to New York City. It was so crowded sometimes she wanted to elbow the other passengers in the ribs until she had space to breathe, but instead, she squeezed her eyes shut and imagined she was alone on a frozen lake, the flat prairie pure white like a blank movie screen.

When they arrived at Dottie’s brownstone, Mr. Harrison got out of the car first and opened Roxana’s door for her. He handed her a small card with a telephone exchange written on it. 

“This is where you can reach me,” he said. “If you’d like a lift back.” His eyes glittered like the jewels on Dottie’s peacock.

She smiled and slipped the card into her beaded handbag. 

A maid led Roxana to a seat near a bay window. A gas flame glowed softly in a glass sconce, illuminating the owls hidden in the wallpaper’s floral pattern. Roxana crossed her ankles. What is it with Dottie and birds? She wondered. 

She heard footsteps on the carpeted staircase and looked up as Dottie swept into the room. 

“I’m so pleased you found it,” Dottie said, holding her hand out for the brooch. Roxana opened her handbag and unfolded the handkerchief she’d used to wrap the pin. Dottie pinned it to the front of her white cotton blouse. 

“It brings me luck,” she said. “I’m getting hungry. Aren’t you? I’d say it’s close to lunch time. Shall we get a car to take us to the Algonquin?”

Roxana nodded, though she wasn’t sure that she could eat anything without it coming back up. 

“Hey, Dottie, do you happen to know a Wilbur Evanson who writes for the Post?”

Dottie cocked her head to the side. The peacock slumped as if it was too heavy for the flimsy cotton blouse. “No,” she replied. “I don’t know that name.” 

At the Algonquin, Roxana ordered chicken broth and picked at a lukewarm popover while she waited. 

“Hair of the dog?” Alex whispered as he sidled up behind her, holding up his silver flask. She nodded and took the flask from him as he sat in the chair next to hers. She asked him the same question she’d asked Dottie. 

“I know quite a few people at the New York Post, but nobody with the name Evanson,” he said. “Why do you want to know?”

“I only invited one person from the press to that party and it was you. I don’t want someone writing about me without me knowing. What if this Wilbur had written about you and your baby carriage?”

Alex laughed and coaxed a cigarette out of a brand-new pack. 

“I’m serious!” Roxana hissed. “We got lucky. But if I have more journalists sneaking into my parties, that’s a real problem for me. It means no more parties. Not at my place, anyway.”

“Well,” Alex said, taking a long drag from his cigarette. Smoke billowed from his nostrils as he spoke. “Whoever it was, it had to be somebody who left before midnight.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because that’s the Post’s deadline for getting stories in. Any later and it wouldn’t have run until tomorrow.”

Roxana sat back and sipped her gin and grapefruit. Scenes from the party blurred like a Renoir painting. The only time she could remember was seven in the evening when Alex arrived with his bootlegged hooch wrapped in receiving blankets. 

“By the way,” Alex said, “I have some news for you. Your producer is in the hospital. That’s why your film stalled.”

“The hospital? For what?”

“You know he’s been taking that radium cure, right? Radithor is its trade name. Well, it’s made him sick. The milkman found him sprawled on the kitchen floor in a silk robe and now he’s laid up at the university hospital.”

Roxana remembered her unanswered phone call to the house on Long Island. “How bad?”

“It’s ghastly, Roxana. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, and I saw guys who got hit with mustard gas in the war. And it’s not just him. There are a bunch of girls over in Jersey who work in a factory that uses radium paint and they’re sick too. One of them died two years ago. It’s going to be a big story. But keep it under your hat. I don’t want to get scooped.”

The waiter arrived with Roxana’s broth and Alex’s broiled squab. Across the table, Dottie sawed through a ris d'agneau and chatted with the editor from Vanity Fair. 

“Worse than mustard gas?” Roxana asked. Alex nodded. He poked the skin of his squab with the tines of a silver fork. “Hells bells,” she whispered. 

Once they were through with lunch, Roxana slipped into the lobby phone booth and rummaged around in her handbag to find her neighbor’s calling card while she waited for the operator to come on the line. 

“Please connect me to Trafalgar five one nine zero six.”

“One moment,” said a tired voice on the other end of the line. 

When Mr. Harrison picked up, Roxanna said, “How about a drink before we head back to Queens?”

Twenty minutes later, they arrived in the Lower East Side and entered the speakeasy in the back of Ratner’s through a door that was disguised as a bookcase. The walls and velvet settees were bordello-red. The bartender served their sidecars in delicate white teacups, and everyone around them spoke in soft voices. 

“My film has no producer,” Roxana mused aloud, “Fundraising was a bust. Hell’s bells. I should just mortgage my apartment and fund the movie myself.”

“Why don’t you? I’m sure it would be a safe return.”

Roxana sighed and ran the tip of her index finger around the rim of her teacup. “Banks don’t often give mortgages to women unless they’ve got a man there to sign.”

“If that’s the case, how did you ever get the apartment in the first place?”

“I didn’t need a bank loan. I bought the place outright. A woman can have whatever she wants if she actually has the money.” She pulled off her gloves and scratched the back of her hand. 

“Well,” he said, “I’m no banker, but if I were, I wouldn’t deny you anything.” He brushed her fingers with the tips of his own, making her skin tingle. 

“What happened here?” he asked as he gently traced the outline of her un-scrubbable ink stain. 

“Too many autographs,” she said, the words catching in her throat. 

“You know,” he said, “I wish you’d call me Milton.” She blushed, but when he wrapped his fingers around hers, she didn’t pull them away. 

Back in Jackson Heights, the uniformed elevator operator held the doors for them. Milton squeezed her hand before getting off on the third floor. As they rode to Roxana’s floor, she asked the operator, “You worked last night, didn’t you, Otto?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you see anyone leaving my floor at around midnight?”

“Yes, ma’am. A woman with short dark hair. She seemed to be in quite a rush too.”

Roxana put her hand against the wall to steady herself. Dottie! Why would she do such a thing? “Thank you, Otto,” she said as she exited the elevator. 

Dottie had plenty of money, living as she did in that monstrous Victorian brownstone that she’d inherited. A single woman could only sit around writing poetry if she had money. Roxana concluded that Dottie must have done it for the thrill of tattling on someone more famous than she was. 

In Night Butterflies, the heroine transformed into a vampire and stalked young boys, old women, newlyweds and even nuns until the terrified villagers nailed boards over their windows and abandoned their homes. In the last scene, Roxana’s character roamed the main road, searching for anyone who remained in the dark, empty houses. The movie ended with an ancient man stepping out of the shadows of an oak grove and stabbing her in the heart with a silver dagger shaped like a cross. 

If Dottie wants to sell stories about me to scandal sheets, Roxana thought, she can fund my movie. 

Roxana waited for the operator to connect her to Dottie on the Upper West Side. 

“There’s no answer,” the operator said. 

“Hell’s bells,” Roxana spat. She hung up the phone.