The Briar Club

The chapter includes recipes for Grace’s Sun Tea and Pete’s Swedish Meatballs.

The story skips back in time to June 1950, and a 12-year-old boy named Pete is the narrator. His mother, Mrs. Nilsson, owns the boarding house. She complains constantly and has Pete doing chores from morning until night. Pete has a little sister named Lina who loves to bake but is very bad at it. She is ridiculed at school because she has a “lazy eye,” and her mother is too cheap to pay for her corrective lenses. Pete is very protective of his sister and encourages her baking endeavors. He misses their father, who left several years earlier and is unable to deal with Mrs. Nilsson’s nagging and complaints. Pete writes to his father but never receives a reply. The boy is delighted when a charismatic woman named Mrs. Grace March takes one of the tiny attic apartments at Briarwood House.

Pete wonders how Grace will get along with the odd collection of boarders in residence. There is a young English wife named Felicity (Fliss) Orton who lives with her infant daughter, Angela, while her doctor husband is stationed in Korea. Brassy, outspoken Claire Haskell works as a secretary at the Capitol. The elderly Reka Mueller is a Hungarian refugee who is rude to everybody. Joe Reiss is a musician who plays saxophone at the Amber Club down the street. Arlene Hupp is roundly disliked for putting on airs and trying too hard to find a husband. She works for HUAC and is paranoid about the presence of communists in the US. Nora Walsh comes from a family of Irish policemen, but she is ambitious to rise in the ranks at the National Archives, where she works. Pete says of the house’s tenants: “None of the boarders ever lingered to talk. Hellos in the corridor, a good-morning over the breakfast eggs, but otherwise it was all just ships passing in the night” (19).

When Grace arrives, she is unfazed by Mrs. Nilsson’s many house rules or the quirks of Briarwood’s boarders. She soon conspires to bring everyone to her tiny flat for Thursday night suppers. This is Mrs. Nilsson’s bridge night, so she is unaware that the tenants are using her kitchen. Grace only asks that her guests bring one canned good item in exchange for their communal meal. Grace tells Pete, “A successful dinner party needs just one person all the others loathe, Pete—it gives everyone something to unite against” (33). In this instance, Arlene is that person. Grace also advises Pete that he doesn’t have to obey his mother’s every command. He just needs to learn to get around the rules.

The story returns to Thanksgiving 1954 and the house narrates as two detectives interrogate everyone on the scene. They speculate that the murder was too brutal for a woman to have committed it. The victim’s throat was slit from the front. The house finds this notion amusing: “Briarwood House is laughing so hard now, it has to calm the light bulbs and chandelier down or else people will think there’s a poltergeist” (42).

The chapter includes recipes for Xavier’s Corned Beef Hash and Nora’s Colcannon.

The novel shifts back to November 1950 from Nora’s perspective. She has grown fond of Grace’s dinners and calls the weekly assembly the “Briar Club.” Nora is determined to distance herself from her Irish family because her policeman brother steals her money to support his gambling habit, and her mother nags her to move back home until she marries. While Nora works for the National Archives, she also holds a second job as a waitress at the Crispy Biscuit café on the weekends. There, she catches the eye of a man named Xavier Byrne. He always comes in for lunch accompanied by his Great Dane, Duke. Xavier is part of the Warring crime family but insists that he is a legitimate businessman who operates the Amber Club and runs a legal poker game.

Nora is attracted to the man but fears getting involved because of a previous bad experience with a brutal cop boyfriend. Xavier continues to woo her by sending elaborate floral bouquets to Briarwood House. One night, Nora sees Xavier beating someone who was cheating at his poker table. He then shoots the man’s finger off. This is Nora’s abusive former boyfriend, George Harding. Later, Nora tells Xavier that she wants no part in the lawlessness. She says, “If we don’t have the law, then all we have is might makes right. And then women always get hurt, instead of just often” (97). She begins to relent when she sees that Xavier is a good man who sometimes operates outside the law. One of his neighbors tells her, “I’m not saying it’s right, breaking the law, but some of those that do are better men than those frauds in double-breasted suits who don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t gamble” (97).

Some of Xavier’s fortitude rubs off on Nora. When she attends a family gathering, she denies her brother the money he tries to wheedle out of her. Likewise, she rejects her mother’s attempts to guilt her into returning to the family home. Nora has learned from Xavier how to be terrifying. She fights for her independence and intends to keep it.

Xavier gives Nora a five-carat diamond ring that belonged to his mother. He promised that he would keep it until he found the woman he wanted to marry. She refuses to consider it an engagement ring and wears it on her right hand. Nora begins an affair with Xavier, but George Harding disrupts their romance when he comes seeking revenge against Xavier for shooting him outside the Amber Club. He breaks into Xavier’s home to rob him while Nora is there.

Afterward, Xavier goes after George and kills him. Xavier is then arrested, tried, and acquitted of murder but found guilty of carrying a weapon. He is sentenced to a year in prison. Even though Nora attends his trial, she decides to break off their relationship until Xavier can distance himself from his gangland connections. She visits Xavier in prison and returns his ring. Afterward, she thinks, “Stroll out of the Rotunda, nailing a smile over that tug in her gut, the beguiling smoke in her veins. Miss Walsh. Heartsick—but her own woman” (110).

The story returns to Thanksgiving 1954 as the murder investigation begins in earnest. The house watches in amusement as the two detectives conduct their investigation ineptly. They are trying to mimic the tough guys on the Dragnet TV show but fail miserably. The house decides to move things along by nudging Grace’s cat in the direction of the parlor. When the feline slips through the door, the detectives discover a second murdered body inside.