A week later, another round of negotiations with Harry Frazee.

Frazee’s office smelled like whorehouse perfume and old money. The perfume came from Kat Lawson, an actress starring in one of the half dozen shows Frazee had running in Boston right now. This one was called Laddy, Be Happy and was, like all Harry Frazee productions, a light romantic farce that played to SRO crowds night after night. Ruth had actually seen this one, allowing Helen to drag him to it shortly after the new year began, even though Frazee, true to the rumors of his Jew heritage, had failed to comp the tickets. Ruth had to endure the disconcerting experience of holding his wife’s hand in the fifth row while he watched another woman he’d slept with (three times actually) prance back and forth across the stage in the role of an innocent cleaning woman who dreamed of making it as a chorus girl. The obstacle to those dreams was her no-good Irish blatherskite of a husband, Seamus, the “laddy” of the title. At the end of the play, the cleaning woman contents herself by becoming a chorus girl on the New England stage and her “laddy” makes his peace with her pipe dreams, as long as they remain on a local level, and even lands a job of his own. Helen stood and applauded after the final number, a full-cast reprise of “Shine My Star, I’ll Shine Your Floors,” and Ruth applauded, too, though he was pretty sure Kat Lawson had given him the crabs last year. It seemed wrong that a woman as pure as Helen should be cheering one as corrupt as Kat, and truth be told, he was still plenty sore about not getting the tickets comped.

Kat Lawson sat on a leather couch under a big painting of hunting dogs. She had a magazine on her lap and her compact out as she reapplied her lipstick. Harry Frazee thought he was putting one over on his wife, thought Kat was a possession to be envied by Ruth and the other Sox (most of whom had slept with her at least once). Harry Frazee was an idiot, and Ruth didn’t need any more confirmation than the man leaving his mistress in the room during a contract negotiation.

Ruth and Johnny Igoe sat before Frazee’s desk and waited for him to shoo Kat from the room, but Frazee made it clear she was here to stay when he said, “Can I get you anything, dear, before these gentlemen and I discuss business?”

“Nope.” Kat smacked her lips together and snapped the compact closed.

Frazee nodded and sat behind his desk. He looked across at Ruth and Johnny Igoe and shot his cuffs, ready to get down to business. “So, I understand—”

“Oh, hon’?” Kat said. “Could you get me a lemonade? Thanks, you’re a pip.”

A lemonade. It was early February and the coldest day of the coldest week of the winter thus far. So cold Ruth had heard that kids were skating on frozen molasses in the North End. And she wanted lemonade.