Publication
Date: February 1st, 2022
Genre: Literary
Fiction/ Contemporary Literary Fiction/ Romantic Elements “Eternal
Lovers”
Publisher: Green
River Press
Rachel
Isaacson, spirited, otherworldly and haunted, is born into a rigidly
Old World family in New York’s Lower East Side. Hungry for
independence, Rachel enters a marriage of convenience with violent
consequences.
Across
the Atlantic, storyteller, fiddler and cliff climber Ciaran
McMurrough is raised in pastoral innocence on Rathlin off the coast
of Ulster. His upbringing in a tight-knit, isolated community leaves
him unprepared for the subtle political passions following the Irish
Civil War.
Outcasts-one
by choice, one by chance-Rachel and Ciaran meet on the docks of lower
Manhattan in 1928. Drawn to each other in this lyrical story, must
they repeat a doomed cycle as eternal lovers?
“Tunnel
of Mirrors fires the imagination and stirs the
soul…a story to savour that remains long in the mind. I loved it.”
-Sunday
Times Bestselling Author of Our Story, Miranda Dickinson
“Humour,
emotion, and perfectly tuned dialogue, ensures her people are
triumphantly alive.”
-Novelist
Janette Jenkins, author of Firefly and Little Bones
“Tunnel
of Mirrors is a beautiful, lyrical recreation of the
past. With warmth, wit and great heart, Ferne Arfin takes the reader
back into the struggles and small victories of a lost world.”
-Toby
Litt, English writer and academic, author of Patience
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Excerpt
Every
morning, on the way to work, Rachel stopped at Bessie’s to change
from the modest cotton dresses her father allowed into one of the
swingy, short frocks that she and Bessie made during their lunch
breaks. Then, their hemlines a daring nine inches above the ground,
the two girls swanked uptown to their jobs at Mishkin’s, Theatrical
Costumiers to the Trade.
Mishkin’s
son, Arthur, managed the sewing rooms. He was sweet on Bessie and any
friend of Bessie’s was a friend of his, so both girls could count
on extra break time for their own sewing. They could count on
remnants of fabric, from time to time, as well.
Mishkin
allowed his trimmers to keep the beads and feathers swept up at the
end of the day. Lately, Arthur, who Bessie kept on a very long leash,
had begun passing on the full boxes of beads that were often left
over when a show was dressed. These were supposed to go back into
stock but Arthur said, “What the heck. They’re paid for. If my
old man asks, you got them from the sweepings.”
“You’re
a real prince, Arty,” Bessie would say and he would glow for a
week. Sometimes she even gave him a peck on the cheek. It was a small
price to pay for the very same sequins and beads the showgirls wore
when they danced for Ziegfeld and Minsky.
Rachel
and Bessie were making special dresses. They had big plans. It was no
use knowing all the latest steps, if you couldn’t show them off at
the landsmannschaft socials, where bearded old men and everybody’s
mother prowled the dance floor. And most of the boys at Corkery’s
Shamrock Dancehall thought a good time was slipping a double bathtub
gin into a girl’s Moxie and seeing how far you could get her to go.
If you went to Corkery’s too often, the regulars started thinking
you were a charity girl who would do just about anything for the
price of a bottle of pop. Drunken boys were always staggering out of
there whistling the tune to I’ll Say She Does. Even though Corkery
made his payments, the place got raided at least once a month. Duvi
said it was part of Corkery’s arrangement with Tierney, who was the
local boss, because it kept the neighbours off the councilman’s
back. Duvi always knew about the raids in advance, so the girls never
got into trouble.
But
now Rachel and Bessie were ready for better things. In the right
place, a girl could meet big spenders who were hot steppers and who
carried real Canadian whiskey in silver hip flasks. But for
high-class dancehalls like Roseland or Dreamworld or Feldman’s
Coney Island Palace, they needed real dance dresses.
Bessie
thought Rachel should bob her hair. But some things couldn’t be
left behind in Bessie’s rooms and Rachel was careful to protect her
new double life. “You said you wasn’t afraid of your old man,”
Bessie insisted. Rachel couldn’t make Bessie, who never did
anything by half, understand that some arguments were not worth the
trouble. Or that most of the trouble would land on her mother. Bessie
hadn’t had a mother in such a long time.
***
Rachel
weighed a heavy hank of glass beads across the palm of her hand.
Bugles. The most delicate cylinders of crystal blue and green,
threaded on lengths of fine silk. They sparked like a shoal of
moon-chased minnows. There were enough to finish.
“And
about time too,” Bessie said. Bessie had grown impatient with
Rachel’s fussy particularity. Anything that glittered made Bessie
happy. While Rachel waited for just the right colours, Bessie had
finished her dress and was stringing a boa of pink dyed marabou
feathers. She waved it under Rachel’s nose. “Ain’t these just
dee-vine?” she said. “Ain’t they just the cat’s pyjamas?”
Rachel
didn’t have the heart to tell her she looked like an explosion at
bead factory; Bessie was so eager to make what she imagined would be
a very grand entrance at Roseland. “Look out fellas, here I come.”
Rachel
had planned more carefully, making sure Arty found just what she
needed. If Arty ever wondered why he took so much trouble for a
skinny Jewish girl, when he was already married to one and when it
was her Irish shiksa friend he was after, Rachel did not let him
wonder for long. Still the dress had taken months to finish. It was
covered with beaded fringe and scattered with iridescent sequins,
flashes of silver and the smallest seed pearls that Arty could
finagle. From its pure white hemline, it rose in a narrow column
through all the greens and blues to a deep cobalt at the shoulders.
When Rachel put it on, she looked like a creature risen from the
bottom of the ocean, seafoam still clinging about her knees.
“Geez,
you look like a million, kiddo.” Bessie said. “Who’d ever guess
you was jail-bait.”
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About
the Author
London-based
American writer Ferne Arfin has worked as a journalist, copywriter,
actress and travel writer. Her short stories have been anthologised
by Virago and Travellers’ Tales. Tunnel of Mirrors is her first
published novel.
