Free Bright Young Things by Anna Godbersen

such a foreign race that they didn‧t use that gesture, too. She had hitched with several different people, of all types, and she had walked a good deal of the way, too. It had taken her all day, but now, at dusk, she found herself on the road that snaked by the famous bootlegger‧s mansion.
    The gates stood open, but for a moment she was paralyzed by the notion that she was standing on the threshold of the place she‧d been yearning to see for so many years. There remained, ever since the conversation with Letty, a great angry knot inside her. It insisted that with a few graceful hand gestures, she could make logical the strange history of her origins. How her mother, the younger of the two Larson girls of Union, Ohio, had been spotted on the front porch of her parents’ Elm Street home during the long, hot summer of ‘09, by a young man working as a driver for a Chicago gangster who was well known in those days but whose name is now forgotten. Fanny Larson had been sixteen at the time, and the driver knew at a glance that he had to have her. He had told her father as much, but the Larsons were God-loving people and didn‧t want their daughter mixed up with that unsavory element. But Fanny had never seen a display of romantic feeling like what this young man showed her. She left that same day and went east to live with him.
    Sometimes they had a good deal of money, and sometimes they had none, but nothing was ever so perfect as that summer day when they first laid eyes on each other. It was when Fanny realized she was pregnant that she began writing home again and came to regret the choices she had made. This according to Aunt Ida, who burned all the letters. Of course Aunt Ida would never do harm to a Bible, and so when Cordelia was given her mother‧s copy, she found the love letter buried deep in its pages with the signature D.G. That was the year Cordelia started working in Uncle Jeb‧s shop, and the legend of Darius Grey was just beginning to spread west, and she began to put the two stories together.
    Soon after giving birth to her only daughter, Fanny fell ill, and there was no money for a doctor, and they had run out on their bills when the baby came, so there was no goodwill, either. “The only sensible thing your mother ever did,” Aunt Ida used to enjoy telling her niece, “was telegramming me when she knew the end was near. I came immediately and took you away from the bad man who was your father, and brought you back home. And he was a bad man, an evil man, even—and I think he would have stopped me by whatever violent means, had he not been so weak with drink when I found him.”
    Cordelia was certain that he had only been distraught, and if he had not been laid so low by her mother‧s death, he would certainly have made sure his daughter wasn‧t taken from him. He wasn‧t a bad man, she had assured herself in the silence of Aunt Ida‧s hall closet, where she was made to stand in the darkness when she had broken a rule, or sent to bed when she was not yet tired enough to fall asleep. And now it was plain to her, as she looked across the sprawling lawn at the parallel rows of lindens that ran along either side of a gravel driveway, at the soft curve of a hill that obscured all but the sparkling roof of a grand house—for no one truly evil could live in a place as beautiful as that.
    People whose whole bodies were dotted with bright and colorful ornaments, and who seemed already to have drunk in some joy that evening, were moving in twos and threes along the side of the road and through the front gates.
    “Darling, have you never been to any of Grey‧s parties?” said a voluptuous girl in pink flowered chiffon, which at that hour proved see-through.
    “Isn‧t it shaming?” replied another.
    “Yes!” cried the first, and afterward the whole lot of them shrieked in laughter.
    Cordelia had that itchy sensation as though she were being watched, and her eyes darted to a little guardhouse on the