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belly from Ellis Island not that far away. My ma and da didn’t take us around much to see the sights, especially if it cost time or money.
    I felt like a little kid when Danny said we should go and take a tour. I had to hold in my giddy feelings so as not to make Danny cross.
    Danny had a thing about that statue. He explained to me about howit had been made in France and carted all the way across the ocean and set up here, a gift to us Americans from the French people.
    I was so excited I couldn’t help it. I opened up and said, laughing, “I think French champagne is the best gift the French people gave us.”
    “This is America,” he said, his voice a razor. “I won’t have you speaking like an ignorant paddy just off the boat. You understand me, Louise?”
    “Of course, Danny. I didn’t mean…”
    He looked at me then, eyes to match his voice, and I shut up.
    That was when I really learned about Danny’s sense of humor. And when I learned to keep my mouth shut, except when I was saying something he’d think was smart. Which was usually something he’d taught me. I tried hard to be a quick learner, but I did wish he liked to laugh more.
    We took the tour, but I don’t remember much about what the guide said. I was busy watching Danny.
    Now, don’t get me wrong. Right after that little excursion we walked the neighborhoods, and Danny gave me sacks of candy to hand out to the kiddos, while he glad-handed their das.
    You know, he liked that Lady Liberty so much, but he couldn’t forget where he came from. He couldn’t forget his Irish roots. He was in America now, but he hadn’t been able to leave behind the feeling that he wasn’t good enough. And that made him both the most generous guy in town, and the most…well, I gotta say it: dangerous.
    Yes, Detective, it’s true. Even though I would’ve walked through wet cement for Danny, that’s what he was. Dangerous.

CHAPTER 8
MAY 21, 1925
They were friends, and began rounding in there every noon for lunch.
—From “New York by Day” article on the writers composing the Round Table at the Algonquin, The Miami News , May 19, 1928
    Jo
    The following morning I had the apartment to myself. If my aunt and uncle had come home during the night and departed again before I stumbled out of bed, I’d heard nothing. I found a white rayon sheath in the closet, the least revealing article I discovered, though it was a skinny silhouette that just hit my knees. It was at least practical and suited to the unseasonable heat; happily, Melody was only a little bit shorter than me and not too much smaller through the hips.
    The sun blazed through the open windows of the living room, and the cacophony of the city rose with the hours. After a lonely breakfast I wandered from empty room to empty room. The bookshelves were lined with books whose spines had never been cracked. The walls were white and hung with paintings that were modern, impressionistic, stark and linear. In the library weredozens of small replicas of statues; most were modern but for one striding Egyptian prince, modern in his own offbeat way. I stared at the painting in the foyer for long time, thinking I’d seen it somewhere, but its soft blue squares were so abstract as to be both familiar and foreign at once. The few tables in the apartment were bare. The floors were polished to a high shine.
    Rarely had I spent time alone in such a vast and new-minted place. It made me uneasy, this impersonal, empty luxury. I thought about my own home, with its scuffed floors and threadbare armchairs and scattered objects—the little vases Ma collected, the antimacassars, the folded newspapers left at the fireplace by Pops. I missed my ma, my quiet little room, and Felix, our mouser cat who mostly hissed in my general direction but sometimes acquiesced to a soft ear rub.
    Here I stood in someone else’s clothes in someone else’s room, and new fears crept through me: fears that I would never find my dreams or my