Forgiving

by LaVyrle Spencer

  “She’s still that way with you?”

  “I’ve made some progress. I bought her a cat—it looks just like old Ruler. You remember Ruler, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “That seemed to break the ice infinitesimally. I’ve been allowed to sit in her room and visit with her briefly, but she refuses to come and visit me at either my newspaper office or here. I’ve never run into her on the street, and she won’t talk about the past. So if you intend to change her, you have a big job ahead of you.”

  “Thank you for the warning. I’ll move with the utmost caution.”

  She felt pity for him, for his undying devotion to a woman who did not deserve it and who would undoubtedly hurt him far more deeply than even she, Sarah, had been hurt.

  “Oh Robert,” she said, leaning forward in her chair and reaching a hand to cover one of his. “It’s so very good to see you again.”

  He turned his hand over, gave hers a squeeze and said, “That goes both ways.” After several beats of fond silence they sat back. “So tell me all about you, your newspaper, the people here and all that gold. The reports continue to astound the rest of the country.”

  They had a long, friendly visit, lasting until nearly suppertime, when the other boarders started clumping in.

  “Where are you staying?” she inquired as he rose to leave.

  “At the Grand Central Hotel.”

  She rose and stood facing him. “I understand some of its rooms are getting plastered. Maybe you’ll be lucky and get one.”

  The door opened and Noah Campbell stepped into the room, dressed for the weather in his thick sheepskin jacket and Stetson. As he closed the door his eyes, unsmiling, scanned Sarah... Robert... returned to Sarah for no longer than it takes a flint to spark. He nodded curtly and hit for the stairs.

  “Just a minute, Marshal,” she called.

  He turned back and stopped several paces from them, his boots planted wide, his hat still on.

  “This is Robert Baysinger, who’s just arrived from St. Louis.” Sarah added for Robert’s benefit, “Noah Campbell, our marshal. He lodges here, too.”

  “Baysinger.”

  “Marshal.”

  The men shook hands. Robert smiled. Noah did not.

  “Mr. Baysinger intends to open up a stamp mill here.”

  “Good luck,” Campbell said and withdrew abruptly enough to appear unpardonably rude.

  “Your marshal doesn’t seem to like me,” Robert ventured when Noah’s bootsteps sounded in the upstairs hall.

  “Think nothing of it. He doesn’t seem to like anybody. I think he has a dyspeptic stomach.”

  They chuckled softly in parting and Robert touched his cheek to hers.

  “I’ll be seeing you soon.”

  “You know where to find me.”

  “Wish me luck with Addie.”

  “Good luck.”

  At supper Noah remained aloof. He talked with the others, joked and laughed, but whenever he glanced Sarah’s way his face turned passive. Afterward she went upstairs to fetch her coat and returned to her office to finish the proofreading she had abandoned earlier.

  There were still coals in the stove, and the clock kept her company with its soft, metronomic tuk, tuk, tuk. She had been reading at her desk for fifteen minutes when the door opened and Noah Campbell entered.

  She removed her spectacles, swiveled her chair and remained sitting. “Yes, Marshal, is there something I can do for you?”

  “I’m just making my rounds.”

  She sat back, holding her eyeglasses upon her knee by their wire bows. “I’m sure you could see through the windows nothing is amiss here.”

  “You don’t usually come down here after supper.”

  “Am I required to get your permission before doing so?”

  “No.”

  “Then I shan’t.” She turned back to work, waiting for him to leave. Behind her all remained quiet while the clock continued its message.

  Out of the blue, Campbell inquired, “Where’s Baysinger?”

  Again she swung to face him. Again she removed her spectacles, made a triangle of them and tapped her knee. “You were very rude to him, you know.”

  “Who is he?”

  “An old friend.”

  Campbell’s mouth took on the shape of one who is trying to bite a poppy seed in half with his incisors. After staring at her for several seconds he shifted his weight to the opposite foot and said, “You’re getting to have quite a few of those, aren’t you?”

  “Must I get permission for that?”

  “Don’t get impertinent, Sarah, you know what I mean!”

  To the best of her recollection it was the first time he’d used her given name.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. Would you care to elucidate?”

  “People talk, you know! It won’t take long and they’ll be saying you’re cut from the same bolt as your sister if you keep on the way you have been.”

  “Keep on doing what?”

  “Spending time with every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along, that’s what!”

  “Are you lecturing me on my morals, Mr. Campbell?”

  “Well, somebody’s got to! Baysinger makes four men you’ve spent time with in the past two weeks! What do you think that looks like, for God’s sake?”

  “Are you forgetting where you were the first time I met you?”

  “That has nothing to do with this!” He jabbed a finger at the floor.

  “Oh, doesn’t it! You frequent the local whorehouse, but I cannot even meet self-respecting men in public places without getting evangelized! If our situations were reversed, would you appreciate being lectured to by me?”

  He glowered at her for some time before throwing up his hands. “I don’t know why I bother wasting my breath.”

  “Neither do I. In the future, why don’t you just save it? Now if you’ll excuse me, Marshal, I have work to do.”

  She presented her back while he stood for several seconds glaring at it. Then his footsteps clunked toward the door and he slammed it with unnecessary vehemence, leaving her to stare at the cubbyholes of her desk with her heart tripping fast in confusion.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Up at Rose’s it was dinnertime for the first shift. Cook had made chicken and dumplings this noon. The aroma drifted upstairs and made Addie’s mouth water. Garbed in her dressing gown, she picked up Ruler and left the room. “Come with me, missy, and I’ll get you some gravy.” There wasn’t much good to say about the life, but the food was one of them. They ate like royalty. Had the freshest foods available, and their own cow boarded at a livery (after all, they needed the butter!) and all the milk, cream, sugar and mashed potatoes and pies and cakes it took to keep a covey of confined females happy. Glorianne was a good cook and didn’t skimp on anything.

  In the kitchen doorway Addie met Ember, one of the Frenchies.

  Addie’s expression grew vengeful. “What’re you doing down here? You’re not allowed in here with us!” She passed the woman shoulder-first, making sure not even her cat’s hair brushed Ember’s arm.

  “Don’t get your tits in an uproar, Eve baby. I just came down to fill my butter bowl.”

  “Fill it on your own dinnertime!”

  “You don’t own the kitchen, bitch!”

  “If I did you wouldn’t be working here at all!”

  They had their social stratum which segregated them at mealtime: the Frenchies, who specialized in oral sex, ate after the straights, who disdained what the Frenchies did upstairs. The ill feelings between the two groups spawned verbal sniping at the best of times, killings at the worst.

  In the last house where Addie had worked, a straight girl named Laurel had put ground glass in the douche of a Frenchie named Clover.

  Addie had friends here, though—good friends. Jewel, Heather and Larayne were already at the table when she entered the kitchen with the cat on her arm. Flossie was there, too, bu
t Flossie never said anything, only ate without bending over and left the room with a belch.

  “I’d watch that cat around Ember,” Heather warned. “She’s jealous ‘cause you got it.”

  “She touches this cat and she’s a one-nipple whore.”

  Everyone but Flossie laughed, then they spooned up. On the floor beside the table, Ruler was treated to her own helping of chicken and dumplings, and gravy made of pure cream, while around the table four overweight women ate their fill, followed by enormous servings of thick chocolate cake with butterscotch-nut filling, topped with whipped cream. Prompting them all to eat more, more, more was Glorianne, an immense white woman who played no favorites, so was loved by all. Glorianne was the mother some of them had never known, the grandmother some of them remembered and the provider of the greatest solace in their sordid lives: food. They ate this way every noon, gorging. At suppertime, just before the customers started arriving, they didn’t eat much at all.

  “Girls, you done me proud,” Glorianne approved as she waddled around the table refilling their coffee cups.

  Flossie got up, burped her way to the door and left without a word.

  “Have you ever seen Flossie smile?” Larayne inquired of the others.

  “Never,” Jewel answered.

  “A couple of times when she scratched Ruler she looked like she was threatening to,” Addie said, “but I guess it was just gas bubbles after all.”

  Larayne reached down and picked up Ruler. Holding her near her face she said, “I wish I had a cat.”

  Jewel said, “I wish I had a man.”

  “How many you want?” put in Addie. “At six o’clock they’ll be pouring through the doors.”

  It was a hackneyed joke with many variations. They had laughed at it a hundred times. Dutifully, they laughed once more.

  Scratching the cat, Larayne grew wistful. “Someday one of those miners is gonna walk in here with his pockets bulging and—”

  “Oh—his pockets are going to be bulging.” Jewel’s interruption got the requisite laugh from Addie and Heather.

  “—and he’s going to say to me, Larayne honey, let’s go buy us a farm down in Missouri and raise some cows and some babies and some chickens and listen to the mourning doves coo while we sit on the porch in the evening.”

  The group had grown quiet. The cat’s purring filled the room.

  “That what you want? A farm in Missouri?” Jewel asked. “Me, I’d take a big city—Denver, maybe. My man would run a bank or a jewelry store maybe, and we’d live in one of them grand houses with the porches and roofs like a witch’s hat, and there’d be a carriage house out back where the help would live, and on Sundays we’d drive along the thoroughfare like I heard the gentry do.”

  “Would you have kids?”

  “Mmm... one or two maybe.”

  “How ‘bout you, Heather? Where would you live?”

  “I’d live where you could see the ocean, and my man and me we’d saddle horses and ride in the surf. We’d have a lot of flowers around the house, and sometimes when my back was tired he’d rub it and that’s all he’d want... just to do that for me without asking anything in return.”

  They thought about it awhile... a man who asked nothing in return. A man who’d deliver them out of this life into one of marital love. It was the fantasy that propelled them from day to day.

  “How about you, Eve?”

  Addie’s expression grew brittle as hard-crack taffy. “You and your men. That’s all you think about—well, you’re wasting your time. Nobody’s going to come in here and carry you off, and if they did, you’d be sorry anyway. There’s not one of them worth daydreaming for.”

  No matter how often they indulged in fantasies, they could not lure Addie. She alone remained cynical.

  At that moment Rose bustled in, dressed in a red wrapper. “Time to pack it upstairs, girls, and let the others eat.”

  They gave her the usual grumblings. “We’re still drinking our coffee... let ’em wait... you’re a hard woman, Rose...” Nevertheless, they vacated the room, taking the cat and their cups with them.

  Addie spent the afternoon ironing her cotton underclothes. She stitched up some popped seams in her gowns and corsets, mixed up a new batch of hair dye and made three poor charcoal sketches of the cat in various poses. At five o’clock she lit her lamp, debated about hairdos—Oriental or French?—heated the hair tongs, arranged her hair in a high pompadour, trimmed it with a feathered aigrette, floured her chest, vermilioned her lips, kohled her eyes and lashed herself into a corset that barely covered her nipples. Beneath it she wore cotton bloomers; over it, the black robe with scarlet poppies, and on her feet, scarlet satin slippers—the girls who wore red shoes turned the most tricks, without fail.

  The talk about husbands had, as usual, brought a backlash of depression. As she checked her reflection in the mirror, Addie’s mouth was tight, her eyes lifeless.

  There was time to go downstairs and have a piece of cake: Glorianne’s healing chocolate cake with butterscotch-nut filling.

  In the kitchen she cut a piece and stood beside the woodbox, eating it. Larayne came in, drank a dipperful of water and found an oatmeal cookie.

  Rose bustled in, trussed in a sapphire-blue surah dress, its twills worn flat from overuse.

  “Fella out there askin’ for you, Eve. Better get out there.”

  “Oh damn. Who is it?”

  “Never saw him before.”

  “I’m having a piece of cake.”

  “Can’t keep the customers waiting.”

  Addie slammed down her plate. On her way toward the door Rose gripped her arm. “Put away the egg timer for this one, Eve. Judging by the way he’s dressed, he’s worth a lot more than a dollar a minute. You peek his poke first, understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Addie answered. In this business there were no such things as set fees. For the familiar men who breezed in and out in a matter of minutes, the egg timer was used, but when a new man showed up, a girl was expected to visit first and use her seductive wiles to get an idea of the fellow’s worth, then sap him to the limit. Sometimes if a man had no money, his gold watch would do, or whatever of value he happened to have. Once Addie had entertained a trick for a bag of dried beans.

  This one, Rose had said, looked rich.

  Addie saw him first from behind. He was standing in the murky lounge reading their “menu” when she entered and caught a glimpse of him through the hand railing of the stairway.

  Though no one at Rose’s called her Addie, there were times since Sarah had shown up in town that she thought of herself by that name: Addie as she’d been before age twelve, holding Ruler, feeding the cat beside her chair, in the company of her friends. She was as close to Addie as she’d ever be again. But the moment she began moving toward the man in the parlor she became Eve.

  She loosened the belt on her dressing gown.

  Strolled with rocking hips.

  Lowered her eyelids.

  Opened her lips.

  Spoke in a smoky contralto.

  “Hello, sugar. You lookin’ for little Eve-ey?”

  He turned... slowly removed a bowler from his head. “Hello, Addie,” he said quietly.

  Her smile collapsed. Her heart plunged and the blood dropped from her face. The last time she had seen him he was nineteen. Five years had transformed him into an adult with thick side whiskers, a fuller face and a neck to match. He was taller, too, and his caped greatcoat gave the impression of substantial width and acquired wealth. He wore kid gloves and held the expensive beaver hat.

  “Robert?” she whispered.

  He hid his dismay well. She was nearly unrecognizable, fleshy and half-dressed, with brittle hair and kohl on her eyes. At fifteen she’d been shy and girlish, at sixteen she’d disguised her young breasts behind dresses with large half-moon yokes bordered by ruffles. Now she had breasts the size of cantaloupes, exposed nearly to the tips, the skin as coarse and loose as bread dough.

&nbs
p; He smiled sadly. “Yes, it’s me.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, closing her dressing gown with one hand. His eyes followed, then dropped politely to the hat in his hands.

  “Sarah wrote to me when she found you. I asked her to.” Not until her clothes were adjusted did he raise his eyes. Her face had grown red with chagrin.

  “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  “Perhaps not. Sarah said the same thing. I found, however, that I could not seem to get on with my life until I had settled this matter of you in my mind.”

  “Forget me.”

  “I wish I could,” he whispered earnestly. “Don’t you think I wish I could?”

  “I’m nothing. Less than nothing,” she claimed flatly.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s true.”

  “No,” he said simply.

  For a moment they exchanged gazes, silent and confused.

  “It’s true,” she repeated.

  “You were the center of all my hopes and dreams. You were sweet and innocent and caring.”

  “Well, I’m not anymore!” she snapped. “Now, why don’t you just get out of here?”

  “I’m not the one who should get out of here, Addie. You are.”

  “What is this, a conspiracy? First Sarah comes poking her nose into my life, now you! Well, I don’t need either one of you! I’m a prostitute, and a damned good one! I earn more money in one week than she’ll earn with that goddamned newspaper press in a year, and I don’t have to work half as hard to do it! I eat like a queen and lay on my back and get paid for it. How many people do you know that have a life so soft?”

  He stood a while before replying quietly, “So coarse, Addie. Are you trying to show me your worst side to scare me off?”

  She gazed at him as if he were a sliver on the board wall behind him. “I’ve got paying customers to get ready for. You’ll have to excuse me.” She turned toward the stairs.

  “You’re not getting rid of me that easily. I’ll be back.”

  She climbed the steps without a backward glance, rocking her hips, holding her head high.