Thursday, December 30, 1920

A group of Episcopalians cornered Nucky in the lobby of the Ritz, but listening to them only took half his attention. He watched the lobby for other potential contacts with the other half of his brain. That's why he saw his daughter, dressed in a patterned gray brocade coat with wide cuffs and lapels and a matching hat over a gray wool dress and carrying a hatbox, step off the elevator with Richard Harrow. The latter was carrying a two-toned blue suitcase that was part of a set Nucky bought Clara when she graduated from high school. Harrow was undoubtedly much better dressed than he had been when he first came to work for Nucky. He was wearing a greenish double-breasted coat with leather gloves. Clara was animated and talking happily, and Harrow, well, who the hell could tell his mood?

"Why was Clara and her suitcase walking out of the elevator with Harrow?" Nucky asked Eddie when he returned to the suite.

"Clara is going to New York with the Darmodys for the weekend. Mr. Harrow is escorting her to the train. Is this against your wishes?" Eddie responded.

Oh, yes. Nucky vaguely remembered Clara saying something a few days ago. Truth be told, he was so busy getting Margaret and the children settled into the new house that he rarely saw Clara these days. When he was in the suite, he mostly just heard the infernal clattering of the keys of that damn typewriter. Days had even passed before he saw her again after their fight on election night, and the next time Clara saw him, she simply acted like nothing was wrong, and Nucky went along. It seemed so much easier.

"No, she's hardly going to elope with Harrow, and she said something about going to New York for New Years with James and Angela."

On the train, Jimmy looked around him. Angela. Richard. Clara. Tommy. He knew he was doing the right thing. It was long past time he married Angela. Tommy would be old enough soon to know his parents weren't married, and Jimmy would be damned if any playground bully would taunt his son with the cry of bastard. Besides, he had all of his favorite people with him. They were young. They had money. It was going to be a great weekend. "This," Jimmy announced, "is going to be the best weekend of our lives."

"I'm glad your expectations aren't too high," Angela said with a laugh but kissed him on the cheek anyway.

"And I'm going to New Pork!" Tommy said happily.

"I still think we should have left him with Ma," Jimmy said.

Angela caught Clara's eye. Not telling Gillian, having their wedding weekend to themselves, was the rare fight Angela went all-in on.

"Hey, that's what I'm here for," Clara said. "Built-in babysitting."

Tommy jumped from his father's lap across the aisle into Richard's, and stuck his feet into Clara's lap.

"Please, Tommy, make yourself comfortable," Clara said while laughing.

"Richard, also sit me?" Tommy asked.

Clara looked up at Richard. "I mean, what more fun could you possibly have than spending time with Tommy and me? You'll get to see all the best carousels and ice cream stands."

Richard looked away. "Yes."

Their hotel, the Biltmore, was attached to Grand Central Station, so they were quickly in the suite. Angela and Jimmy left to get their marriage license.

Richard read one of the brochures on the coffee table. "We could. Go ice skating. Here at the hotel. They turn one the gardens. Into a rink. In the winter."

"I've never been," Clara said. "But it sounds like fun, and Tommy could stand to burn off some energy."

"I'll teach you," Richard says, not making eye contact with her.

Clara watched Richard lace up his own skates and then Tommy's with quiet confidence. "Do you think I should wait?" she asked.

"Why?"

"Because you only have two hands, and you also have two people who have never stepped foot on the ice," Clara answered.

"You'll be fine," he said. Clara nodded, far less sure.

Once on the ice, she's even less confident. She stands against the wall while Richard holds Tommy's hands and gets him used to gliding around the ice. He's going to be a good father one day, she thinks and feels heat creep up her cheeks. She stares down at her feet. She knows what she's actually thinking.

He'll be a good father to their children one day. Her breath catches in her chest, and her face grows even hotter. She thinks of how she felt when she saw him asleep at Margaret's when her pajama-clad leg brushed his. The smell of his neck when he carried her into the Ritz off the street. The feel of his hair under her hand.

She can't have these feelings for Richard. He's her friend. He's...she can't even imagine how he would react. It took weeks of basically living together for him to make regular eye contact with her.

"Clara!" Tommy cries happily.

"You are doing great!" Clara replies, laughing. Richard is just barely holding on to him, and when he lets go, Tommy doesn't realize and keeps skating smoothly.

"Look at you, buddy," Clara hears Jimmy's voice behind her. Jimmy and Angela take Tommy, and Richard holds his hand out to her. As always, Clara takes it.

Thursday Night

"You look smashing," Clara tells Angela in the master bedroom, which the girls have overtaken to get ready in, leaving Jimmy and Richard to Clara and Tommy's room and bathroom. Angela's wearing a beaded black dress which, along with her bob, makes her look incredibly modern and enticing as hell.

"You look pretty smashing yourself," Angela said, admiring Clara's green velvet dress with copper embroidery. "Do you have darker lipstick, though? I think it would look better with this dress."

Clara hands over her wooden tube of Molinard lipstick. "Are you happy?" Clara asks Angela quietly.

Angela carefully applies the dark red lipstick. "I'm happy everything is going to be settled. We should have married back in 1916 before Jimmy left. Or when he first came home. We couldn't go on like we were forever, not one thing or another.

"Are you happy?" Angela asks Clara in return.

"I'm happier than I was last year. Jimmy's back, I'm not engaged to a sea monster, I'm making money writing, I have friends I enjoy spending time with..."

"Richard," Angela interjects.

"Richard, you, Jimmy, Tommy. Margaret, even. Margaret is taking over more of the duty engagements I used to do for my father, which is a relief," Clara starts to say more but instead looks down at her hands.

"Something is bothering you. Could it be Gillian and the Commodore playing happy families with Jimmy?" Angela looks at her via the mirror. Clara nods slightly.

"Gillian...she loves Jimmy so much. And her life has been so difficult. Those facts don't make her less of a succubus, though. I'm always afraid she's going to suck the life right out of him. And the Commodore...we were terrified of him as children. Nucky, he'd take us both over there. That house is a nightmare-those dead animals everywhere. And the Commodore seemed so creepy even then."

"But something happened with your father?" Angela prods. She's all too well aware of Gillian's need to claim Jimmy for her own.

Clara looked down again. "I think what Jimmy needs from my father Nucky is just not capable of giving. Not even to me, really. I think my mother, and what happened with her, it just broke that part of him. Or maybe he never had it. But I don't Jimmy's going to find it with Gillian and the Commodore, either." Clara looked up, and Angela had a dreadful realization.

Clara was scared.

When Clara and Angela left the bedroom, Jimmy grabbed Angela and kissed her hard. Clara skirted around them to join Richard on the sofa.

"Thank god you're here," Clara tells him. "I need someone to talk to. I think we can write them off for the weekend."

"You look. Nice," Richard tells her. It's not what he wants to say.

Clara smiles. "As do you," You look ridiculously handsome in that green suit, is what she thinks. We match, she wants to tell him. I wouldn't mind if you kissed me, she considers saying. Instead, she looks back at Angela and Jimmy. "I think we only have one option." She leans over to the cocktail table where Jimmy has placed a bottle of bourbon, pours two glasses, puts a straw in one. "Let's get blotto."

Tommy tucked away in bed with a hotel sitter watching him, they depart towards Greenwich Village. Angela is highly excited and brings along the Brownie camera Jimmy had given her for Christmas. Clara typically doesn't enjoy forced fun or crowded spaces, but that night had the rarest of magic: they were young, everyone loved each other to some degree, and they wanted to have fun.

And so they did.

Jimmy picks up the camera to capture Angela and Clara dancing together like a couple of enthusiastic chorines. Clara picks up the camera at the speak with the velvet sofas and sits on the table to capture Jimmy and Richard, and then each man alone. Richard uses it to capture Jimmy and Clara sharing a cigarette, something he had watched them do a hundred times without ever understanding why. Angela and Clara take their picture in a hallway with two mirrors, so their image is reflected into infinity. Clara grabs the camera back to capture Angela sitting on Jimmy's lap at the last speak.

They are walking, Clara doesn't know where to or why, and she realizes she and Richard are holding hands. Maybe he's trying to keep her from falling. "You grab a drink with both hands when you are a little smashed," she tells him, trying to enunciate each word carefully.

He looks down at her. "I'm not teasing you. It's adorable," she keeps talking. "I'm sorry, I'm so smashed I can't feel my face."

"Hmm. Sometimes that happens. To me."

Clara looks up at him, wide-eyed, and then starts to giggle. She laughs so hard she stumbles a bit, and he has to right her. Angela and Jimmy turn around.

"Jesus, I wish they'd just kiss already," Jimmy says and hails a cab.

***********

One small foot in her back wakes Clara once more. She sits up on the edge of the bed. Her head is still swimming, and Tommy has now kicked her awake at least four times. It's amazing how someone as small as Tommy can take up an entire bed. He's now turned horizontally. She considers trying to maneuver him back to position when she hears the noise. It sounds almost inhuman, a frantic growl of pain and horror.

Richard.

She walks into the living room and sees him thrashing on the sofa. Nightmare. His hands are pulling at the damaged side of his face, blankets and pillows tossed on the floor. Leaning over him, she tries touching the undamaged side of his face.

"Richard, it's okay, you are okay..."

"Help me," he growled and then grabs at her as he trashes. She ends up between him and the back of the sofa. His eyes opened, so Clara thought he was almost awake.

"Richard, wake up. It's Clara. We are at the Biltmore in New York. You are having a bad dream," from what he was saying, she thought he was reliving when...whatever happened to him happened to him in France. "Shh, shh, it's okay."

His face felt like it was on fire. He couldn't remember who he was; he just felt the pain. Then he realized he wasn't alone. He forced himself to open his eye, half-expecting to only see gauze. Instead, he saw Clara.

"Clara," his breathing was still ragged.

"It's okay. You were having a nightmare," she said softly.

She placed one hand on his healthy cheek and the tips of her fingers along his left jaw. "It's alright. I understand about nightmares," she said softly. Richard looked up at her with an intensity that took her breath away.

"My face. Is still. Hot."

Clara readjusted so that her face was against his forehead, and then she gently kissed it. Richard went absolutely still.

"You don't feel hot. It must just be an aftereffect of the dream. You've scratched your face, though."

"Mmm. I do that. Sometimes. Drinking. Makes the dreams worse."

"I used to twist my hair so badly I'd wake it up with it in knots, or just laying on my pillow where I had pulled it out."

"Is that why. You sleep. With your hair braided?" Richard asked, remembering her braided hair all the times he had seen her get up from bed, which he realized was something he had seen often, and something he thought about a lot.

"It is." Clara's voice sounded far away. Richard thought she was about to get up. Instead, she turns her face so that he can't see her eyes. "Alcohol and morphine, right? I'm so sorry that you thought my nightmare had anything to do with you that night. My nightmares, they are old." Clara decides it's time she tells someone, and suddenly she has a real need to tell Richard her secret.

"It's my mother and my, well, my brother. My mother, she really wanted a baby. It was difficult for her. She lost a lot of pregnancies, before me and after me. My uncle Eli, he tells me how sweet and wonderful she was, and I have a few memories like that, but mostly I just remember her being sad.

"When I was eight, she had a baby. They named him Enoch Junior. He was tiny. Too small. My mother decided that he was so fragile she didn't want anyone in the house. She was afraid he'd catch something. So she kept me home from school. There were no nurses, no maids."

"You don't like. Walking past. The premature baby window," Richard said, remembering the times Clara would walk around the hospital/exhibit on the Boardwalk.

"No, I don't."

"Your father?" Richard asked.

"He had just become county treasurer. He was busy. He was very busy. I didn't really see him after the day the baby was born. At first, it was okay. The baby was so small, he looked like a doll when he'd move his arms and legs, and his cry was tiny. After a couple of days, I didn't hear him cry, but my mother, she kept taking care of him. She rocked him all the time. She forgot to feed me, and I guess herself. We had bread and things, so I ate that. One day I was starving, and there wasn't any bread or crackers left. So I went into the nursery, and she was changing him.

"His hand," Clara starts crying. "There was no skin, and his face was purple and swollen..." she can't continue.

The horror of her words hits him. A tiny, hungry, scared Clara realizing her mother was caring for her brother's corpse.

"That night, when my dad came home, he saw. He took the baby, and it was buried. My mother, though, she couldn't accept it. Gillian and Jimmy came, and Gillian, she tried to reason with her. Gillian loved her. But...

"Anyway, the doctors told my father that she'd get better with time. So he hired a housekeeper, so at least we'd eat. One day, about a month later, I came home from school. It was a Wednesday, so the housekeeper had the afternoon off. The housekeeper, I don't remember her name, she had left me a piece of pie. Apple. It was apple. I heard my mother upstairs, but...I didn't want to be sad. Jimmy had walked me home, and we'd played pirates in the park, and I just wanted to eat the pie and not be sad for one afternoon.

"I went upstairs after I ate the pie, and heard her in the bathroom. I thought she was brushing her teeth. I heard a gurgling sound," her voice broke again.

Richard tightened his grasp because somehow he and Clara were wrapped around each other. He wished he was a normal man who could kiss a crying girl and make it better. Clara warm and pressed up against him was doing things to him, but the thought of her moving away was unbearable. He knew that gurgle, he knew what must have happened to her mother.

"It sounded wrong, though. So I opened the door. She'd used my father's razor and slit her wrists" Clara began to cry. "Do you know what I've never understood? Why wasn't I enough?"

"Mmm, no," he said as he tried to wipe her tears away.

"Anyway, after my father found us, he whisked me away to the Ritz-not as much space as we have now, just a few rooms. And that was that."

He had never understood why Clara seemed so lonely and lost. She was so beautiful and funny and nice.

He decides he can share his secret, too. "It was the. Hmm. Summer of 1918. It was. Open warfare. I was in. A tree. I was picking off. German's with machine guns. I got four. Crews. They must have seen me. They shelled. The tree. The shell. Didn't hit me. It was. The tree. All I remember. Is light and heat and burning and pain. And then nothing. And then, operations. Operations. Morphine and the boat home, and then the trains, and then coming home. I thought I'd come home. As me. Instead, I came home. As this."

"Oh, Richard." Clara curses herself. She can't bring herself to say anything else. Whenever she needs to be truly modern, she always fails. She wants to tell him... she's not sure what. So she allows herself to stroke his hair, and he rubs his thumb back and forth along her hand, and soon they are both asleep. When he wakes in the morning, she's gone.