Forgiving

by LaVyrle Spencer

  “Otherwise we can do the trip. Most men like the trip. It’s got just about everything and it’ll take about forty minutes. Tell me what forty minutes of heaven is worth to you, Robert. We’ll start out nice and slow...” She reached down his trousers and stroked him indolently, and to Robert’s chagrin he was turgid. He grabbed her by both elbows and held her away. “Please, Addie... Eve. I’ll pay whatever you ask, just don’t... don’t...” Don’t be so facile and practiced. “Could we just get on with it in a straightforward manner?”

  “Sure.” She backed off and dropped the seductive act, exchanging it for cool detachment. “Let’s say twenty dollars. In advance.”

  Twenty dollars, twenty minutes or thereabouts. Could he get her to talk in twenty minutes? He’d been unable to do so in the weeks that he’d been here. What purpose would it serve if he put them both through this and she shed no light on that time five years ago?

  She accepted his gold pouch and weighed out a full ounce, returned the pouch to him and waited while he stood uncertainly.

  “Would you like to kiss me, Robert?” she asked.

  He swallowed and answered honestly, “No.”

  “Would you like me to kiss you?”

  “I’d like to talk, Addie. Could we just talk?”

  “Of course.” She took his hand and led him to the bed. They sat on the edge and she pulled one knee up on the mattress, turning to face him. “But I won’t talk about the thing you came here to talk about. Anything else, but not that. Are you lonesome, Robert, because it’s Christmas? Is that it?”

  The words he wanted to say were trapped in his throat.

  “You miss your family?” Her voice seemed genuine with caring for the first time since his arrival in Deadwood.

  “No. I never was close to them. Well, maybe my brother Franklin.”

  “I never met him. I never met any of them.”

  “I wanted you to.”

  “Well, sometimes things just don’t turn out.” She reached out and stroked his lapels. “You’ve done very well for yourself, haven’t you, Robert. You’re rich, just the way you always wanted to be.”

  “I wanted to be rich for you, too, didn’t you know that? It’s why I was away from you so much during that time when—”

  She covered his lips with a finger. “Shh... nothing about that.”

  He gripped her hand and held it against his breast. “Why?” he asked passionately.

  She shook her head slowly, breaking into tiny pieces inside, Eve and Addie warring with one another. She had survived the minutes since spotting him in the parlor by reverting to Eve, by hardening herself to all human emotion. She could get through this if she kept Addie locked up and out of sight. Vulnerable, aching Addie, who Was weeping inside her right now, who wanted to cover herself and hide in Robert’s arms and beg his forgiveness, beg him to excuse her from this unspeakable act that would reduce them both beyond redemption.

  “Why, Addie?” Robert repeated. “I deserve to know after all this time. I’ve been through seven hells believing it was my foolish advances that forced you to run, but I’ve never fully understood the rest of it. You were young, I know, and I was old enough to realize you weren’t ready, but why did you desert your family? Do you know how your father suffered? How Sarah did?”

  “I did too,” she said poignantly.

  “Then why? Why this?” He passed a hand through the air of the sleazy room.

  “Because it’s the only thing a woman knows.”

  “No. Don’t tell me that because I won’t believe it! You were a virgin that day we were in that cart of flowers. I know it just as surely as I know tonight that you’re not. You were terrified of what nearly happened between us. That’s why none of this fits!”

  Addie begged, Tell him.

  Eve said, Get it over with.

  Her expression glazed over. She glanced at the clock beside the bed. “Robert, I have to start timing you from the minute the door closed. We’ve already used up five minutes. You’ve got fifteen more to go. Are you sure you want to spend it talking?”

  Any sentimentality she’d shown had vanished; there would be no further answers, he could tell.

  He rose from the bed and began loosening his tie: two brusque yanks while the skin on his facial structure seemed stretched so tightly the bones showed through. His mouth was rigid, his eyes dispassionate.

  “All right, let’s get on with it.”

  He removed his jacket, hung it on the coat-tree. Then the watch fob. The vest. The suspenders. His shoes and socks, sitting on the bed as if he were the only person in the room. His shirt, standing with his back to her. His trousers. Down to his wool union suit.

  He turned to face her. “Well, are you going to sit there all night on my twenty dollars?” She hadn’t moved a muscle. Her eyes were wide like that day on the flower cart.

  “Well?” he snapped.

  Don’t, Robert, please. “Sometimes the men like to undress us.”

  “I have no desire to undress you. Do it yourself,” he ordered.

  His union suit was opened to his navel. He dropped his arms to his sides and waited, little understanding why he wanted to humiliate her. Perhaps because he himself was humiliated to be here, to be engaging in this depravity which with each passing moment was approaching the time of least grace.

  “I’m waiting, Eve,” he ordered.

  She rose and stood before him, as straight as St. Joan’s stake, her eyes fixed unwaveringly upon his. She removed her kimono, tossed it to the bed. Slipped off her satin shoes. Garters. Stockings. The corset: its hooks came free in a series of lunges which he followed with his eyes, breast to belly. It dropped to the floor. She opened her chemise and dropped it, too. Beneath it the skin was crosshatched in a pattern of wrinkled cotton. His eyes perused the wrinkles, lifted to her naked breasts, lingered, then rose to her face while she worked the button at the waist of her pantaloons. One glinting tear had formed in each of her eyes, hovering at the outer corner like dew at the tip of a leaf.

  His throat filled. Inside him, something rended.

  “No, Addie, not this way,” he whispered, stepping forward and hiding her against himself, pinning her arms at her sides. “I cannot do it this way.” His eyes were closed, his eyelashes wet. “Not for gold. Not with you hating me and me hating myself. Forgive me, Addie.”

  She let herself be held and hidden, standing limply in his arms while Addie crept out of isolation and tapped at the door of a hurting heart.

  “Aw, Addie, what have we come to?” He caught the back of her head in an open hand and held her while they cried together silently, too close to see faces, too shaken to speak. A door closed down the hall. Someone laughed. Downstairs the parrot squawked. The clock beside the bed ticked off two costly minutes... three... still they remained, her hair meshed with his beard, two of her bare toes stacked upon his big one.

  “Put your clothes back on, Addie,” he whispered hoarsely, moving as if to release her.

  “Wait.” She clung, hiding still. “I have to tell somebody. I can’t live with it any longer.”

  He resumed the pressure of his arms around her shoulders and waited. Her throat was caught on his shoulder. He felt her swallow.

  “It was my f–father,” she whispered at last, with her fists closed in the scratchy woolen underwear on his back. “He used to c–come into my b–bed at night. He used to make me d–do all these things with him.”

  The splash of shock caught him like scalding water. His stomach took up some slack he had not known was there. Denial sprang to mind—somehow you’ve misunderstood, Robert.

  “Your father?” he whispered.

  She nodded, bumping his shoulder, holding her sobs inside so they palpitated against his stomach.

  His hand went to her head and pulled it more tightly to his neck. Could he have made of himself a complete circle to shield her from every side, he would have done so.

  “From the time my mother left.”

  “Oh Ad
die...” He had not known pity could reach such immense proportions.

  “I used to sl–sleep with Sarah, and then Mother left and I st–started wetting the bed so Father put me in a room of my own and that’s when it st–started. He used to tell me that if he rubbed me down there I w–wouldn’t wet the bed anymore. It was very lonely without Mother and at f–first I liked having him climb in with m–me and h–holding me.”

  Robert’s tears fell on Addie’s hair while the two of them remained sealed together like blades of wet grass.

  “You were just a child.”

  “It was long before I knew you. Long before I fell in love with you.” Her words were distorted against his collarbone.

  “He forced himself on you? Totally?”

  “Not at first. That began when I was twelve.”

  “Twelve...” Twelve... sweet heavens, twelve. He had known her at twelve. He had watched her play the spinet with that haunted solitariness that kept drawing her away. She had owned a green plaid dress with a white pilgrim collar that hung down nearly to the points of her budding breasts. He had sometimes sneaked glances at them while her eyes were on the music. Remembering, he felt guilty for even so small an infraction.

  “Just at the time you began to mature.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “About the time I began noticing you growing up, too.”

  She remained silent.

  “It got worse then, because of that, didn’t it?”

  Still she said nothing.

  “Didn’t it, Addie?”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know.”

  The world behind Robert’s eyelids was blood red with agony. “Oh Addie, I’m sorry.”

  “You weren’t the cause. It had begun long before you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell someone... Mrs. Smith, Sarah...”

  “He warned me nobody would believe me. I would be laughed at and pointed at. What we did was forbidden. I knew it by that time, and they might even take him away, he said, and then Sarah and I would have nobody to take care of us. I believed him and I was afraid to tell Mrs. Smith. And how could I tell Sarah? She would never have believed me. Father was her hero.”

  Some hero. Robert’s shock began congealing into anger at the bestiality inflicted by Isaac Merritt upon a child of utter innocence, too young and indoctrinated with fear to have means of combating it.

  “And all that time, while you were growing away from me, I thought it was something I was doing. At one point I believed you were dying of some deadly disease, you had changed so much and seemed so frail with worry. Did he ever tell you I spoke to him about it?”

  She drew back to see his face. “You did?”

  His hands remained curled around her shoulders. He spoke directly to her eyes. “He told me it was the differences in our ages, yours and mine, and that you undoubtedly felt pressure to allow my advances when all the time he was the one preying upon you.”

  “Oh Robert...” She rested her hands on his chest. “I could see the heartache I was causing you and Sarah, and so many times I ached to confess to you.”

  “Not confess!” he insisted. “Never confess. To confess implies guilt when you were guilty of nothing.” Robert’s rage thickened.

  “But you loved me and I was unlovable and unworthy.”

  “That’s what he wanted you to think. Did he pump you full of those ideas too?” He could read the truth in her face, could imagine how Merritt had manipulated her by fear and debasement, infiltrating her mind with whatever lies it took to keep her quiet and submissive. Robert’s rage came full force and brought with it a passionate fury. He swept Addie’s robe from the bed onto her shoulders. “Get dressed, Addie. You don’t ever have to disrobe for a man again. Your ordeal is over.” As if to a third party, Robert cursed while donning his trousers. “God damn him to hell. What fools we were, all of us! Why, I played right into his hands. I went to him asking permission to marry you when you were seventeen and he said yes. After that you drifted farther and farther away. I see it now. It all fits.”

  Addie had donned her robe. He gripped her hands so hard her fingers overlapped. His eyes blazed as he spoke. “Do you know what I would give to have him alive for one hour? I would cut off his testicles and stuff them in his mouth like a roast pig!”

  “Oh Robert...” She could think of nothing else to say.

  “What does it take to get you out of here for the night?”

  “Robert, you can’t—”

  “What does it take!” he repeated more demandingly.

  “You have to buy me off the floor.”

  “To the tune of what?”

  “Two hundred dollars.”

  He gave her his gold pouch. “Measure it out.”

  “Two hundred dollars? Robert, that’s silly.”

  “I’m a damned rich man. Measure it out.”

  “But Rose will—”

  “We’ll fight with Rose later.” He was hurriedly donning the remainder of his clothes. “It’s Christmas Eve, Addie. I’m not leaving you in this whorehouse on Christmas Eve, and if I have it my way you won’t be back at all, so weigh the gold!”

  When his clothes were in order she was still facing the bureau with the gold pouch held limply in one hand. From behind her shoulder he took the pouch and told her quietly, “I’m sorry I shouted at you, Addie. Here, I’ll finish that while you get dressed. Pack only what you need for decency sake. I want you to take nothing away from this place.”

  He suddenly realized she was standing with her back to him, crying quietly. He turned her to face him. “Addie, don’t cry. The time for crying is over.”

  “But Robert, what can I do? I’ve lived behind these doors so long... you don’t understand.”

  How many times could a man’s heart break? “You’re afraid?” he said gently. She had since the age of three never lived a normal life. Walking out with him would be an act of normalcy, but more—of courage. “My poor, poor girl, of course you’re afraid. But I’ll be there with you. Now come... get dressed. Do you have street clothes?”

  She nodded forlornly.

  “Where are they?”

  “In my room next door.”

  “We’ll get them.”

  He carried the remainder of her garments and they closed the door on the wretched room he vowed she would never enter again. In the dark next door he said, “Where’s the lamp?”

  “Straight ahead.”

  When he lit it a white cat lifted its head off the bed and squinted at him over its left shoulder.

  “Can I take Ruler?” she asked.

  “Absolutely. He’s the only good thing in this place.”

  “And my tussie-mussie from Sarah?”

  “Of course.”

  Her clothing hung on pegs, little of it suitable for polite company. He chose the plainest dress he could find and waited with his back to her as she put it on. When he turned, she was waiting, her makeup run, blurring her face like an impressionist’s painting. He wet a cloth in a nearby basin and held her chin while gently washing away the diluted kohl from her eyes and the carmine from her lips.

  “You won’t need this anymore either, Adelaide Merritt,” he vowed softly, and when he was done, stood before her studying her familiar green eyes, which were swollen from crying. “How I’ve longed to see the Addie I remember. Little by little we’ll bring her back.”

  “But Robert—”

  He silenced her with a touch on the lips. “I don’t have all the answers, Addie, not yet, but how can we find them if we don’t start searching?”

  Downstairs she deposited the two hundred dollars in gold dust in a drop box in the hall, and told Rose as she passed, “Robert is buying me off the floor.”

  “Twenty-four hours and not a minute more, you hear me, Eve?” Rose called after her, then added, louder, “Where are you taking that cat?”

  With Ruler in her arms and Robert at her side, Addie walked into the cold Christmas air.

  Ab
ove them, “O Sanctissima” was ringing through the gulch.

  “Could it be a sign?” Robert asked, lifting his face as they strode in long, matched steps.

  “Heaven doesn’t send signs for prostitutes,” Addie replied.

  “Don’t be too sure,” Robert replied, slipping his hand around her elbow.

  At his hotel the desk was abandoned. A note, tacked to the pigeonholes, said, GONE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. Robert stepped behind the desk and selected a key.

  “Who says there’s no room at the inn?” He smiled as he returned to Addie and touched her back, directing her toward the stairs. On the second floor he opened a door, went inside and lit a lantern. The room was plain but plastered, and there was a curtain of sorts on the window. He opened the door of a round iron stove and knelt before it.

  “But Robert, we haven’t paid for this room.”

  “I’ll catch up with Sam in the morning or whenever he gets back.”

  She stood uncertainly near the open doorway as he rose and turned. “I have to go out back for some wood. You’ll find a tin in the hall with water, if it isn’t frozen. It should be empty enough for you to lift by this time of the day. Get the whole thing and bring it to the stove, will you, Addie? I’ll be right back.”

  She released Ruler, who explored the room. Robert returned in minutes with an armload of wood, knelt and built a fire, closed the squeaky stove door and adjusted the grate. He rose once more, brushing off his hands as he faced her.

  “When you’ve finished your bath, knock on the wall. We can talk then if you like.”

  “Thank you, Robert.”

  He smiled. “I’ll bring you a nightshirt, just a minute.”

  She listened to his footsteps fade and return. He re-entered and handed her a folded nightshirt. It was blue and white striped flannel. The stripes quavered as she looked down at them through fresh tears and repeated, “Thank you, Robert.”

  He stepped nearer and lifted her chin with a knuckle. “Knock,” he whispered, and left her, closing the door behind him.

  The room had a rocking chair. She dropped to it and doubled forward, burying her face in the blue flannel stripes. She sat a long time, motionless, acclimating to freedom, wondering what Robert’s intentions were, if any. The water began to sizzle and she rose with a sense of wonder to stir it with her finger. The only bathing vessel present was the bowl beneath the pitcher. She made do with it, and afterward hung her towels carefully and stood beside the radiant stove, warming her skin, feeling fear bake out of her. She dressed in the nightshirt. It felt like crawling into Robert’s skin, where everything was normal and secure and you had a sense of purpose. She brushed her hair and recalled how he disliked it black, so reclaimed her damp towel and bound it turban-fashion around her head before quietly tapping on the wall.