This particular morning, I’d been pondering whether I ought to have mentioned the trifling matter of the Japanese attack in my monthly column—the “Lady of Nassau,” inside back cover, perhaps you’ve read it—in between the account of the Silver Slipper Ball and the speculative frenzy over the invitations to Nancy Oakes’s coming-out party at the British Colonial Hotel.

It wasn’t as if we’d ignored the whole shocking incident, the barbarous attack on American soil. My goodness, Miami lay only a hundred and eighty miles to the east, whereas London was over four thousand miles away. In general orientation, Bahamians were more American than most of New York City. But there was this turquoise sea, you understand, these palm trees and sea grapes, this heat and this somnolence. When they broadcast the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio, everybody at the Red Cross and the sailing club just exchanged a blank stare with his fellow man. Shook his head and said how awful it was. Two weeks later, nothing had materially changed, except that the Americans had mostly fled and the hotels stood half-empty and sort of forlorn. At a loss what to do, really, since Nassau has nothing if it hasn’t got American tourists to tend to, then as now. Nassau was where you came to escape the war, and now the war had landed smack among us, like a Japanese bomb of unknown explosive power, yet to detonate. Did you acknowledge this thing? Or did you tiptoe around it, pretending it didn’t exist? This was supposed to be paradise, for God’s sake.

The door creaked behind me. Veryl appeared, coffeepot in hand. “Telegram come for you, Miss Lulu,” she said.

“New York?”

“New York.” She refilled my cup in a long, steady stream. When she was done, she reached inside the pocket of her apron and pulled out a yellow envelope, which she placed on the table next to the saucer. “You decide what you gwine wear for the party tonight?”

“Not yet.”

“I be leaving at noon for the afternoon shift, remember. Can’t press no dress if I got no dress to press.”

“I’m thinking of the blue velvet.”

Veryl made a sound like Mmm, mmm, which might equally have meant approval or displeasure. I never could tell, but I did know that Veryl’s taste in clothing—unlike mine—was infallible. Her mother had been a dressmaker, she once said. Of her father, she said nothing, but I had the idea—I can’t recall why, maybe one of Jack’s tidbits—that he was a white man, a Bay Street merchant, which was not an uncommon state of affairs in the Bahamas in those days. Certainly it would explain Veryl’s canniness in the ways of the world.

“You don’t like it?” I said.

“Nobody wear velvet in Nassau, honey. That dress look like something somebody Boston grandmother wear.”