But with this reticence, perhaps because of it, Joey learned things. As simple as tracing the past by walking slow down the six turns of landings from her top-story room to the ground floor and studying the photographs framed on the walls along the way. Some framed newsprint. By dates, clothing and the slow-changing face tracing thirty years in the woman’s life. From music halls and revues onward to be a single figure in concert halls and extravaganzas. And Joey decided Virginia Reeves was older than she looked and then decided she looked as old as she was, and so learned; life was not always a flattening press but might also be a conveyance toward a stretching-out into something she might call dignity. Self-possession. An attribute, she determined, that come what would she’d locate within herself.

Then Virginia Reeves began to have people in for dinner: small parties of four or five, at most six guests, men her own age or older, some with wives and some alone or with younger women companions, actresses one and each. The wives regarded the actresses with cool appraisal. Virginia Reeves paid no attention to this but while appearing to include equitably each of her guests it was with the men that another coded language was spoken, all at the table aware of it and no others trying to take part. At the end of each of these evenings Virginia and Joey would sit together and Virginia would instruct her in who each of the men were—what theatres they owned or which entertainment companies, what their political positions were and what that meant within the frame of greater Providence, what sports teams or ball clubs they owned a share in, what their other business holdings were, how devoted each was to their own particular pursuits, as well as which ones drank too much or were frivolous with the actresses. When Joey asked when she would sing for them she was told the men knew well enough why they’d been invited, and something of who the strange dark girl was, simply by her presence at Virginia’s table. “We will let them think about you a little bit, let them wonder just who you are. It’s good for men. Let their imaginations work before you even open your mouth and they will be lovestruck. You’ll see.”

August then and she missed her period and fretted but chalked it to excitement or the strange place when she thought about it which she didn’t as best she could. At first thought that wanting to sleep, needing to sleep all the time, was only a way to avoid that panic, to close her eyes against it. She was not sick but allowed Virginia Reeves to think she might be as explanation for her fatigue and so although not sick found herself mealtimes staring down at the food on her plate as upon heaps of strange matter, some alien forage that even as she minced into small pieces and lifted to chew and swallow she could not believe she was doing so. And felt the eyes of Virginia Reeves upon her not just at those times but all others as well. And the panic would break through its fine web and flush through her. As if the panic was an advance guard of the truth she would not face.