When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins EPUB & PDF – eBook Details
- Author: Eden Robins
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available for Download
- Series: None
- Price: Free
- File Size: 1 MB
Christmas Eve, 1944
If a doorman wouldn’t open the door, was he still a doorman? It was like one
of Papa’s groaners: When is a door not a door? (When it’s ajar.)
Franny Steinberg wouldn’t have let herself into the glitzy Palmer House
Hotel either. She looked shifty. Frizzy. Raccooned by mascara. She rubbed
her eyes but just made it worse. Feet were numb from running in her awful,
too-small boots. Bare, frozen wrists jutted from her ratty old peacoat. Stupid
growth spurt couldn’t have waited until after the war?
But Franny had vanquished bigger foes than a measly hotel doorman. She
had big plans for this particular Christmas Eve, and she had already twisted
the truth in many terrible ways to get here. Lied to her parents about spending
all evening downtown with her best friend, Mary Kate Finnegan, and then
lied to Mary Kate, saying she had to rush home early for—and Franny was
not proud of this—a “Jewish thing.”
“Aren’t Jewish things at sunset?” Mary Kate had held her palm out like it
was raining. “It’s been dark for hours.”
“Don’t be rude,” Mary Kate’s handsome brother, Peter, had said. “Not
everyone’s religion makes sense.
Two lies didn’t make you a liar, not if the cause was righteous enough. At
least that’s what Franny told herself, out of breath and at the mercy of the
reluctant doorman.
And this cause was righteous. Tonight and tonight only, comedian Boopsie
Baxter was in Chicago to perform at the Empire Room.
Franny had been following Boopsie’s headlines for months—arrested on
obscenity charges, arrested for doing comedy in a segregated nightclub,
arrested for being obscene, handcuffed in her elegant floor-length mink or her
spangled gown, smiling slyly, directly into the camera.
Franny wanted what Boopsie had. A grin in the face of danger. More devilmay-care, less knots-in-the-gut. A belief in winning, even when it looked a
heck of a lot like losing. Franny needed to see Boopsie Baxter. Because
Boopsie Baxter had a Showstopper. A legendary, famous, secret
Showstopper that was too spectacular to talk about in the papers. And that
Franny wasn’t even completely sure she believed in.
Through the windows, twinkling lights and bows dangled from the ceiling,
bored bellhops displayed themselves over countertops to the front desk girls.
Wind and snow stung Franny’s face, and her feet throbbed in her tight boots,
thumping a staccato of Showstopper.
Franny just had to know if Showstoppers were real or phony, because if
they were real, then magic was real. And if magic was real, she might just be
able to bear this endless, dreary war. Dreariness was fine and dandy if it kept
her brother, Leon, safe, but it didn’t. Franny got all the safety, and he got
bupkis.
The doorman relented. Franny ducked inside, melting gratefully into the
entryway, wiggling her toes and trying not to think about sore thumbs.
Everything in the Palmer House was gilded, marbled, bejeweled, or furred.
The people were furred, anyway. Franny took the marble stairs two at a time,
up to the landing, nearly skidding into a sculpture of Romeo and Juliet,
forever batting eyelashes at each other. Poor suckers had no idea how their
story would end. The stairs split at the landing, each side curving up to the
bustling lobby bar.
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