Several evenings later, Charley sat at the Captain’s table politely smiling and intent upon her latest avocation: charming the other diners with made-up stories about Cole Porter in a refreshing change from her stories about the notorious queen of the fences and patron to the New York underworld, Mrs. Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum, who was a prominent hostess to late 19th century New York high society and her criminal “inner circle, or the confabulatory perambulations about the bloody histories of the stately châteaux in the Loire Valley. (I was almost certain—and Tilly agreed with me—that Charley made up half of those too, there was nothing of that sort in the pamphlets I gave her, nor in the French history we had been taught at school.) Tilly had worked on her for days to finally get her
