“They called her the Tenth Muse.”
“What’s a muse?”
“Um. Well, it’s a goddess who inspires writers, artists, dancers, poets—you know, that sort of thing. The inspired people were almost all male, of course. I supposed they liked the idea of female assistance.”
“But she wasn’t a goddess, was she?”
“No. And not really a muse. Just a girl born on the island Lesbos.”
“Lesbos? As in lesbian?”
“Uh-huh. Nearly all her poems are lost but the fragments we have are mostly about crushes on girls. The most famous and complete is an ode to Aphrodite. I read it for a class.”
“Aphrodite?”
“AKA Venus, Goddess of Love. The poem’s a prayer begging for help to turn a rejection into passion.”
“Didn’t the men object to poems like that? You know, feeling left out, that it’s against nature and that sort of thing. Reverend Pearson said homosexuality’s an abomination.”
“Well, they probably did object. She was exiled for a while, I think, and I suppose that was why. But apparently her poems were so good that the men finally overlooked what they were about. Or maybe it didn’t bother them so much as it did your Reverend Pearson. The Greeks weren’t Methodists, you know; they still aren’t. Anyway, Sappho’s supposed to have written all kinds of poetry but especially the lyric kind.”
“What’s that?”
“Poems meant to be sung, accompanied by a lyre. A lyre’s a little harp.”
“Were all the women on Lesbos lesbians?”
“No. The island had a big city and it turned out a bunch of other writers, all male. But Sappho was the best of the lot. And she loved women. So that’s why women who love women came to be called lesbians. Because of her poems. Because she lived on Lesbos.”
“Hmm. Well, I kind of like the idea of an island with only women on it. It’s like Wonder Woman, isn’t it? Flirting and falling in love and praying to goddesses about it and playing their little harps. Of course, keeping up the population would be a problem. I mean, they couldn’t have babies. Oh, but they could import lesbians. In fact, lesbians would probably all want to immigrate to Lesbos, one without men. Imagine. No fathers or brothers, no cigars, no Reverend Pearsons, no pawing, or grabbing, or stalking.”
“Or raping.”
“You really think men would stand for it? I mean men like the ones around today?”
“I don’t know. I expect a few might find it stimulating, a challenge, maybe exotic. I think women would like it, though.”
“So, that’s where you got your big idea, isn’t it?”
“Professor Honigswalt used to say, ‘Girls, the classics are always useful.’”
In the decades between V-J Day and the March on Washington, people still went to night clubs, swanky places that started during the Depression, and were located in the lively downtowns of big cities. Suburban couples would make a date for a big night out together on the town. Affluent siblings would celebrate their parents’ golden anniversary at big tables. Well-off men scored points with first wives or tried to impress prospective second ones. Deals were sealed over the clubs’ starched white tablecloths; veterans reunited; proposals of marriage were offered and usually accepted. Young people who could afford it would go to clubs just to take over the dance floor and wow their elders with their moves. Like everything else in those days, the clubs were rigorously segregated; that is, the patrons were white and, often, the talent was not. No doubt, the contrast stirred doubts in liberal-minded customers; but back then everything about race and gender seemed fixed, all variations pushed into back rooms, tables, sketchy neighborhoods. And yet, within the buzzcut conformist limits of the time, night clubs still had an air of democracy about them. Gangsters and politicians came, electricians and dentists, welders and district attorneys. Though it was rare to see women on their own—brides with their bridesmaids, the proletariat of the publishing houses, widows celebrating widowhood together—all the clubs featured young female staff. Young women with heavy cameras and bags of flashbulbs would circulate, taking black-and-white shots, glossies that would later show up in old albums: everybody smiling and dressed to the nines. Attractive young women, clad less modestly than the photographers, roamed the tables bearing trays resting on trim midriffs, the Pall Malls, Chesterfields, Parliaments, and Lucky Strikes all neatly laid out. Still other young women, dressed in demure blazers, checked coats and hats by the door and handed back numbered brass tags. Cocktail waitresses in risqué outfits took orders for alcohol, sex’s less sinful cousin. The Brobdingnagian menus had sections listing fancy concoctions like Bullshots, Sidecars, Mudslides, Pink Squirrels, Mai Tais, and Sea Breezes.
It was their good looks that landed these young women their jobs and the tips on which they subsisted. Men with big cigars and flabby jowls sat behind desks and sized them up when they applied. The best looking were made cocktail waitresses and earned the biggest tips. Most of them were from out-of-town. They shared studio walk-ups with hotplates and bad plumbing. They talked late into the night about the big tippers and the small, about what sort of men they’d marry, how they deflected the passes made by arrogant head waiters, unctuous sommeliers, entitled bosses, drunken customers. They drowsily rehearsed their high-school adventures and gossiped about movie stars. They picked over the reviews of Broadway shows they hadn’t seen and divulged the hopes and fantasies that had drawn them to the city. Some, with giggles, fumbling, and various disparagements of men, made experimental love.
Meredith Turner was from the bourgeois sector of Albany. Her father was a banker. The family was well off; there were vacations in Florida and trips to Europe, a new Cadillac every two years. They sent her to an expensive private day school after which she enrolled at Vassar. Meredith was a gifted student, bookish, and intended to major in Classics. Midway through her sophomore year, her father’s embezzlement was detected. He denied everything but hanged himself the night before the start of his trial. There was suddenly no money; the house was double-mortgaged, the life insurance cashed in years earlier. Meredith’s mother went to pieces and was taken in with a bad grace by her brother in Los Angeles. They fixed up the attic for her. Meredith dropped out of Vassar, took the three hundred dollars left in her account, and moved down the Hudson. She found a squalid room in a Bowery fleabag, tore into job-hunting, and landed one checking coats at The Casbah, a popular nightclub with a phony Levantine décor. Here she met Susie O’Dwyer, a red-headed waitress from Columbia, South Carolina. Susie liked the idea of cutting her rent in half more than she disliked doing the same to her studio apartment and Meredith moved out of the flophouse and in with her. Susie talked incessantly about her plans, ambitions. She already had a stage name and a manager; she was going to be a star. However, after her twentieth audition yielded her twentieth rejection and her manager dropped her, Susie had a breakdown. Her Yankee-hating parents came north and, with rather satisfied looks, hauled their defeated daughter back to South Carolina.
Louise Hatterfield grew up in Granville, Ohio. She didn’t care for the small town, her big Methodist family, or Ohio, even if she was homecoming queen, star of the prom, and universally admired for her looks. She worked at a drug store through high school and saved her money. It wasn’t much but enough for her to take off for New York a week after graduation. She left a brief note for her parents and another for her siblings apologizing for absconding and promising to write. She applied at the Casbah, lied about her age and, once the boss got a look at her, was offered a job as a cigarette girl with a promise of promotion to cocktail waitress if things worked out. Louise also found a roommate at the club, The Casbah’s photographer, but she also left when she landed a job with an upstate newspaper.
Meredith heard about Louise losing her roommate two days after losing hers and invited her to move in. Louise was grateful. She might have found another roommate, but she liked Meredith, was impressed by her education and that she was twenty instead of nearly eighteen. She thought of her as almost a big sister, a non-Methodist one. Meredith liked Louise too, appreciated her innocence, called her Lou, and felt protective. Their habits and schedules meshed; they wore the same size shoes and tops, and neither dwelt on improbable dreams of fame and fortune—in short, they were compatible. Though they didn’t love their jobs at The Casbah, they weren’t at all bitter or resentful like some of the girls; in fact, there were things about the work that they appreciated beyond the tips. They were picking up skills and, for an hour or two each evening, The Casbah felt sophisticated and jolly, even if the gaiety was forced and the high spirits merely alcoholic. Louise learned how to handle men and the women they brought with them. Meredith made a study of how the club worked, asking the older staff a lot of questions, spending breaks interrogating the people in the kitchen. Practical minded, not consumed with improbable ambitions, generally uncomplaining, Meredith and Louise made the best of things.
They persuaded the maître d’ to assign them the same night off, Tuesdays. These were for dating patrons who asked nicely, college students Louise met in a diner or, in Meredith’s case at a museum or the library. They formed the habit of critiquing the men who asked them out. They preferred double dating which facilitated these review sessions and also provided an extra measure of protection against the aggressive or repellent. Some men sent them presents like costume jewelry or showed up with flowers, chocolates. These gifts were reviewed as well.
“Roses?”
“Only a half-dozen.”
“You like Jim’s bracelet?”
“Not really. The thing reminds me of a washed-up welter-weight—too heavy and ugly.”
The men fared even worse.
“Tommy has an overbite and that joke about the two secretaries on the escalator? It was just crude. Did you notice that he laughs too loud and spits when he does it?”
“What did I think of Fred? Not a sixteenth as much as Fred thinks of Fred.”
Late on a Tuesday night that had wound up in a fetid bowling alley with their dates trying to top each other’s score and beer-capacity, Lou and Meredith went to bed together. It was all new to them, but they soon figured things out.
“It feels more like remembering than discovering,” sighed Louise afterwards.
“Plato,” Meredith murmured.
They couldn’t wait to get home Wednesday night.
Meredith found a spot in the dingiest part of the East Village; an Italian joint had gone belly up. She also had a plan for the money they’d need. Everyone they’d invite to join would chip in what they could, but the serious capital would have to come from willing parents, persuadable boyfriends, and sugar daddies. She would only try the banks if she had to.
They knew plenty of talented singers, dancers, and comediennes who’d work for nothing, or almost nothing.
Meredith named the place Sappho’s. It would be an all-female nightclub.
“It was really your idea, Lou,” she said when she laid it all out.
“Mine?”
“Remember? Your imaginary male-free Lesbos.”
“That?”
“We’ll make an island of our own. I think we can recruit all the staff we’ll need from The Casbah. The kitchen’s already there. The real estate guy swears the plumbing and electricity are up to code. We won’t spend a lot on the décor; we’ll put up posters.”
“Of what?”
“Women, of course. The biggest one’ll right by the entrance, a reproduction of Charles Auguste Mengin’s portrait of Sappho. You’ll love it. She’s bare-breasted, draped in black, leaning on a rock with a lyre hanging from her right hand like a gunslinger’s shotgun. Very cool.”
“What color’s her hair?”
“Jet black.”
“Just like yours! So, who else?”
“Culture heroines. Josephine Baker, Isadora Duncan, Mae West, Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf. I don’t know. Maybe Clara Schumann, Djuna Barnes, Martha Graham, a Brontë or two. . . Mary Shelley—or her mother. There’s a poster shop in the Village. We’ll see who they’ve got.”
The Casbah had to replace all its young women except for three cocktail waitresses. Two sugar daddies came through; the realtor was eager to get the place occupied and gave them a reasonable rent. They did their own painting, built a small stage, had enough money for tables and chairs. They picked up cheap cutlery, glassware, and plates from a restaurant remainders store in SoHo. They stocked the bar with the necessities, recruited a good jazz trio, folk singers, comics. The city was awash with female performers looking for a place to perform. Meredith had handbills printed and splurged on an ad in the Village Voice to announce the opening, complete with a blurry reproduction of Mengin’s Sappho. “New Nightclub. Women Only. No Cover.”
The place was mobbed from the first night. Young women from all over the city came and older ones from uptown, even Westchester. It was a novelty. Business was brisk and, once they decided to add a cover charge and to price the drinks almost as high as The Casbah, they made enough to pay the staff a bit more than minimum wage and to pay back the sugar daddy who hated the idea and dropped his mistress. Their other big backer was so infatuated that he didn’t ask for anything, just groused that he couldn’t get in.
Other men were more of a problem. Lou was prescient when she wondered whether the Greeks would put up with Sappho. There were threatening letters, a brick through the plate glass. An indignant letter to the editor appeared in the Times. City inspectors began showing up at a harassing rate.
Women having a good time without men offended and frightened the boyfriends. When one of the waitresses relayed her beau’s complaint to Meredith, she plucked a wine glass from the bar, held it up, and said, “The male ego.”
One night there was a disturbance or, more precisely, a demonstration. Young men gathered on the sidewalk, the street. Many were drunk, some angry, others mocking. All of them were hostile. The police boke it up. Then the police came back when there was no disturbance. There was an official letter from the city saying they would be taking steps to close the club down. One of the girls was dating a public defender, he said he’d love to take the case. He was so eloquent at the initial hearing that he not only got the judge to toss the case out but to chide the assistant district attorney.
Sappho’s was a phenomenon. Some women came because they were sapphic and said it was the only place in the city where they felt comfortable and could be themselves. Others came because they were intrigued or out of feminist solidarity. There were also women who simply wanted to get away from the men in their lives for an evening. The performers began to garner some reviews, to have reputations and snag bookings. Two of them got jobs on Broadway.
Then came the arson. The authorities never found who did it, if they even bothered to look. There were too many suspects. It could have been the miffed boss of The Casbah, any number of disgruntled, threatened men. The proprietor of the failed Italian restaurant had come by after the demonstration ostensibly to express sympathy but also with an offer of “protection,” so it could have been the local Mafia whose views on women were presumably in line with the Pope’s.
Sappho’s died in the flames. The staff scattered. A few left the city for wherever they’d come from; some found jobs in retail, as receptionists, secretaries but most as waitresses. Upscale restaurants in need of attractive female staff opened almost daily. Without knowing it, all of them, were waiting around for the Sixties, the Seventies.
“What are we going to do?” Lou asked.
“Move on,” said Meredith.
“Together?”
“You have to ask?”
Meredith chose Chicago because it was the country’s second biggest city and neither had ever been there. “Virgin territory,” she declared cheerfully.
They found a one-bedroom in a converted Victorian in the Old Town neighborhood, the liveliest and most bohemian in the city. It reminded them of Lower Manhattan, except that everything was much lower.
Meredith found work at the Lincoln Park branch of the Chicago Public Library and Lou was hired as a hostess by the Chicago Cut Steakhouse. Both liked their work and Chicago, even in the winter. They were contented.
For Louise’s fortieth birthday, Meredith fished out her old Greek books and made a translation of the opening and closing verses of Sappho’s Tithonus poem. She hired a calligrapher to write it out in fancy script on vellum and had it framed.
Hold fast, little girls, to the Muse’s purple gifts
And cling to your sweet lyre, that lover of music.
Eros has given me a beauty not found in the light of day,
The passion and the patience for life that’s lost on the young.
They hung it beside the one thing that they’d rescued from the fire: Mengin’s portrait of Sappho.
