The Jewel Cage

by Jane Steen

  “I know you’re trying to act in Thea’s best interests,” I said. “I understand how painful this year has been for both of you. But Thea has at last found something to do that she likes, and she’s doing it well and giving no trouble. Surely that’s better than seeing her rebellious and miserable in a boardinghouse. You don’t mean to make her wretched, do you?”

  “We give each other nice things, Teddy, remember?” Tess spoke as soon as I stopped to draw breath. “We don’t give our children stones or serpents or scorpions. I don’t like Thea very much—well, I don’t, Nell, I’m just trying to be truthful and you needn’t flap your hand at me like that—but I think cleaning house is kind of a scorpion thing for her.”

  Martin reached for the bowl of nuts and offered them to Teddy. “If you’ll take the advice of an older man, Teddy, a girl Thea’s age is too young to be lectured on her womanly duty. Give her a little freedom while we’re still able to exert some authority over her, won’t you? She’s obeying the rules of the residence just fine. She’ll become more womanly in time.”

  Thea had listened attentively to our exchange, her face now suffused with warmer color. To my surprise, her small white teeth suddenly showed in a charming smile, directed at her brother.

  “I forgive you, Teddy. And you’ll see that I’m far better off at Rutherford’s, really I am. I’ll save money out of my wages so we’re beholden to nobody, not even your Mrs. Galloway, just how you like it. You won’t have to worry about looking after me because I’m so well looked after already. It’s what Pa and Mamma would have wanted.”

  Teddy stared down at the tablecloth with a sigh. “Seems like you’re all determined to convince me.” He looked up, directly at me. “You’ve been kinder to Thea than her behavior warrants, and I’m in your debt for trying so hard. For your sake, I’m prepared to keep my own counsel for a while longer.”

  Part II

  1878

  23

  Diligent idleness

  March 1878

  “What are you smiling at?” my husband asked.

  I turned to see Martin behind me, enjoying the warmth emanating from his person as he moved close and placed a hand on my shoulder. Although it was early March and the sun was shining, the snow lay in an even blanket on all untrodden ground, pitted here and there as it melted under the force of the sun’s rays. Cold radiated from the window out of which I was looking; icicles dripped large blots of clear water onto the stone sill outside, making small splashes on the glass.

  “I’m smiling at Tess,” I answered Martin, reaching for his fingers. “She looks so dignified.”

  Martin’s breath was hot on the side of my head as he leaned forward to watch our friend descend from her very own landaulet. We had had an extra step made, but she still had to cling hard to Donny’s outstretched hand, hampered as she was by her ruffled day dress and fashionably long, buttoned coat with its deep fur trim. She accomplished the maneuver with a straight back, and we watched the single plume atop her small, neat hat bob as she turned to reach out to Sarah.

  “Sarah’s going to get her feet wet again.” I sighed. Sarah jumped from the top step to the dry street and then ran straight into the melting snow, heading for the snowman she and Martin had built the day before. It was also melting, and the old top hat it wore was sliding down its round head, which had lost an eye.

  “We’d better go down.” Martin kissed my temple and turned toward the stairs. I followed more slowly, yawning. I had taken advantage of the quiet Sunday afternoon to do what I almost never did, lie down after luncheon on the chaise longue in my boudoir while Martin made himself comfortable in an armchair. Lulled by the soft rustling of Martin’s newspaper and the distant sounds of the trains making their way along the shoreline, I had drifted off to sleep in the blissful calm.

  We reached the bottom of the stairs just as the front door opened.

  “I fixed Mr. Snowbanks, Papa.” Sarah brought the fresh smell of snow with her from the outdoors, and her fingers were bright pink and dreadfully cold as she seized my hand. I shivered.

  “Your feet are wet.” I watched as Sarah pulled at the bow of ribbon tied under her chin and handed me her hat.

  “I know.” Sarah took the button hook I gave her and began working on her smart black patent-leather pumps. Her thin legs—grown suddenly longer in the last month—were comical in their black-and-white striped stockings.

  “Where are your galoshes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Seven and a half is old enough to remember to put galoshes on before you go in the snow.”

  “It was only for a moment, Mama.” Sarah wriggled her feet, now free of their boots, as she started on the buttons of her double-breasted coat. “Goodness, what a lot of buttons.”

  “May I help?” I asked my daughter as I helped Tess remove her coat.

  “No, thank you, Mama.” Independence was Sarah’s watchword; commendable, of course, but I couldn’t suppress a brief pang of loss at every indication that my child was growing up away from me.

  “I’m going straight to the library to toast my feet in front of the fire.” Sarah handed me her coat; independence did not yet stretch to hanging up her clothes. “Miss Baker says you should never sit around with wet feet.” She lifted one foot, put a finger on the wet wool, and then, noticing the damp print on the wooden floor, ran around experimentally for a few seconds. Nodding with satisfaction at the resulting pattern, she dashed off to the library, Martin in her wake.

  I lingered with Tess in our spacious hallway, which still smelled faintly of sawdust, putting Sarah’s coat away and placing the damp boots near the stairs. We expected our servants to take their Sabbath rest as much as possible, so nobody had come to disturb our peace. When another yawn stole over me, I let it come, stretching my arms over my head.

  “You’re tired, Nell.” Tess stood still while I unpinned her hat.

  “I had a nap. You look a little weary yourself. Was Aileen difficult?”

  “She guessed Donny was the young man I told them about.”

  Tess came to me, and I put an arm around her shoulders. She felt good—warm and solid and reassuring—and I silently thanked God for sending me this friend and stalwart ally.

  “I suppose that’s for the best, isn’t it?” I said. “Did she offer an opinion on him? They must have seen him a few times by now.”

  “Oh yes, I introduced him the first time he drove me, and of course Ma and Da insist that he step into the parlor for a drop of tea and a bite of cake each time he comes. They can always find a boy to hold the horse for a short while and keep the alley rats off till he gets back.”

  “How nice.”

  “Yes, I’m glad they met him. It’s harder to rail against people when you’re acquainted with them, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes.” I tightened my grip on my friend’s shoulder. “So what about Aileen?”

  “I don’t really know.” Tess turned a puzzled face up to me. “She’s polite enough to him, but she watches him—like a cat watches a mouse, I guess.”

  “Perhaps she’s trying to figure out if he likes you back.”

  Tess wrinkled her short nose. “If she figures it out, do you think she could tell me?”

  I laughed. We reached the library and made our way around the huge double desk in the center of the room to sit on the Chesterfield settee. Martin, ensconced in an armchair, lowered his journal for a moment to smile at me. Sarah—sitting at a sensible distance from the fire since she had already singed her stockings on more than one occasion—twisted round to greet us anew with a wide grin, exposing gaps where two of her incisor teeth had fallen out.

  “We’re going to have a telephone! Papa says.”

  I groaned as I lowered myself onto the leather seat. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Still, I might have known it would happen.” I looked at Martin. “Must we have one in the house as well as at the store?”

  Martin opened his eyes wide, their gray irises reflecting tiny glimmers
of flame from the fire. “How else am I going to speak to Joe whenever I want to?” He leaned forward, the journal dangling from his fingers. “Just think, we’ll be able to talk to our people directly, without having to send messages back and forth. This far from the store, that’s a godsend.”

  “Or the work of the devil.”

  I sniffed faintly, leaning into the settee’s curved back and once more thanking Providence for the disappearance of the bustle. My house dress, cut in one smooth line—the princess line, as it was called—was the most comfortable item of day dress I had worn since I had come to Chicago. I closed my eyes, listening to Martin explain the telephone again to Tess with interruptions from Sarah, who seemed to have absorbed a great deal of information about the new machine.

  “Are you sleeping, Mama?” I sensed a weight on the settee beside me and opened my eyes to find Sarah’s face close to mine.

  “If I was, I’m certainly not now.” I gathered her to me, rubbing her feet as I did so. They were very warm and almost dry. There seemed to be fewer and fewer occasions nowadays when I could hold Sarah in my arms; she was changing fast, acquiring new interests daily. Even her face was altering, growing longer, strong bone emerging from the soft roundness of early childhood.

  “You look tired.” Sarah touched a careful fingertip to the skin under my eyes, one after the other. “Your eyes are sort of different. Not just today, all the time now.”

  “It’s merely the winter.” I smiled. “Soon it’ll be spring, and we won’t be getting up in the dark. I always feel so much better when I wake up to daylight. That cough I had in January didn’t help either.” I stroked Sarah’s crisply waved hair as she settled her head under my chin. “And last year was such a hard one—bad news everywhere—wars with the Indians, the withdrawal of the troops from the South, all the hardship in the country. And for us, the strike, the Lombardi family—Thea . . .” I let my voice trail off, kissing Sarah’s forehead. Days of calm like this were all the sweeter for the memory of Thea’s sour looks and slamming doors.

  “Not to mention moving to a new store and a new home.” Martin spoke fondly, but there was a small frown between his eyebrows.

  “Other people did most of the work when we moved,” I laughed, trying very hard not to look tired. I wanted to erase the frown on Martin’s face; I wanted Sarah to see my smiles and not my weariness. But I was weary. The sore throat that had started on the second of January had become a hacking cough by mid-month, and although I was now well in body, I seemed to be a little low in spirits. Winter was dragging on forever, even though snow in March was not at all unusual, and I could not reasonably expect the return of the warm weather until the end of April. I was both restless and all too often exhausted.

  And yet I had nothing to complain of. Thea was doing well as a sales floor junior; I sometimes saw her as I crossed the floor, and she would respond to my greeting with a polite nod. The report from the residence in which she lived was that she was reserved but not unfriendly toward the other girls and had found two or three girls to walk out with on her afternoon off. Martin regularly invited her to our house on Sundays, but she had only accepted the invitation once since Christmas. I was optimistically inclined to view this transformation as a minor miracle, even though Elizabeth, now ripe and round with the imminent arrival of her first child, had a tendency to mutter darkly about still waters running deep. Tess was no less skeptical, and Madame said nothing at all.

  I yawned again, gazing at the flames that were licking the sides of the fresh log Martin had put on the fire. Tess, who had repaired to her favorite armchair to study her Bible, took advantage of the moment of quiet to read out loud, as she loved to do. I recognized the passage from Ecclesiastes:

  “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life. And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labor, it is the gift of God.”

  Tess put the ribbon back in its place and smiled at me as Sarah slid down from the settee. Sarah wriggled herself into the corner of one of the window seats, a position from which she could see Martin’s journal. He was now reading about electricity; he was, truth be told, a little put out that Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia were installing electric lighting and was determined to have a telephone before they did. I was clearly going to have to reconcile myself to the infernal machine, which rang a bell to signal a “call.” It would probably be even more of a disturbance than the stock ticker that chattered away at intervals in Martin’s office.

  The sun had vanished in one of Chicago’s rapid changes of weather, and clouds had gathered. Through the window behind Sarah, I could see sparse snowflakes falling, slowly at first but gradually becoming a fine, fast torrent that whispered against the windowpane. I had always connected the snow with my father’s death, but that fear was gone; now I imagined him sitting in the window seat smiling at the granddaughter he had never known and felt a smile curve my own lips.

  Thoughts drifted through my head—the two rows of buttons on the highly modish dress I had cut the day before for a girl not much older than Thea but already showing promise as a society belle; the choice of menus for the next week; and above all a memory of Elizabeth, the softened contours of her face in late pregnancy and the inward-looking smile that had appeared on it as she smoothed a hand over her belly. I had been turning the pages of Peterson’s Magazine to show her a warm winter coat which, we both agreed, could easily be adapted to a maternal condition. “For next time,” she had said. “It’s too close to my confinement now. Or perhaps you’ll be next to have a baby?”

  But that wasn’t why I was tired. I was certain I wasn’t with child. Elizabeth’s baby appeared before me, clad in a princess-line dress with two rows of buttons, and I was fitting it for a fur-trimmed winter coat as sleep took me into its arms.

  Evidently, my lowered state of health had also been noticed at the store.

  “You are tired, Mrs. Rutherford.”

  I lifted pencil from paper and looked up at Madame Belvoix, who had appeared at my side.

  “Was I yawning?”

  In answer, Madame sat on the empty chair next to my desk and tugged out the papers below the design on which I was working. I’d been sketching out ideas for the summer: long, sinuous silhouettes of dresses that followed the curve of waist and hip seamlessly before flaring out into a train. Not the princess line this time; these were formal, sophisticated gowns for dinner parties and outings to the theater.

  “Good.” Madame leafed through the papers, running a finger down the notes I had made at the side. Once she approved such designs, which were never drawn with a specific customer in mind, we employed artists to make up drawings to use on the sales floor. Our couturières could alter details of the dresses to suit the customer. Although I involved myself with the choice of fabrics and trimmings in many cases, it was quite possible for a Lillington design to be achieved without the high cost of my own presence.

  “Thank you,” I said in reply to Madame’s praise. But her next words threw cold water over my complacency.

  “Good, but not up to your usual standard.”

  I was taken aback. “They’re not?”

  “It is fortunate that your usual standard is so high.” Madame favored me with one of her fleeting smiles. “So these are still good. Our customers will like them. But they are not brilliant. They are not inspired.”

  I leaned my head on my hand, gazing at the drawings Madame had replaced on my table. She was right, of course.

  “I’ll start again.”

  “The result will be the same. You are tired. Too much new house, too much new husband, too much new Rutherford’s department store. Too much incident in your life. You’ve had many changes in the past twelve months, have you not?”

  “You know I have.” My hand went to m
y hair, looking for a loose curl I could make even looser. “And it’s almost April and still snowing.” I sighed. “Christmas is so far behind, but spring is so far ahead.”

  “And you work so very hard. So does Mr. Rutherford. The two of you never stop.” Now there was a sympathetic gleam in Madame’s eyes, but not too sympathetic. For her, hard work was the normal condition of life.

  I puffed out a brief laugh. “That’s true. Heavens, it’s almost a year since we married, and we’ve had just a few days off here and there.”

  “As I pointed out to Mr. Rutherford this morning. He was worried that you were looking fatigued. Naturellement, it took a woman to explain the solution to him.”

  “Which is?”

  “I will tell you something you need to understand.” Madame’s hand descended on my arm, patting it in a regular rhythm to emphasize her words. “You are a creative artist. Art must be fed.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m a dressmaker.”

  “You do not think what you do is art?” Madame’s hand left my arm, and she tapped the side of her own head with one small finger. “Your dresses come from here. And here.” She laid a hand on her bosom. “And for a very long time you have been starving both head and heart. When you do not give them room to expand, your ideas get smaller.”

  “But I read the journals—I talk to you and the other couturières—” I stammered in my haste to defend myself.

  “It is not enough.” Madame’s eyes shone steel gray as she gazed at me. “The shadows under your eyes say it is not enough.” She waved a hand over my summer dress designs. “These say it is not enough. You must learn to live for your art. And Mr. Rutherford worries about your health, and worry will make him tired also.”

  “Yes.” I remembered the drawn, lined look of Martin’s face two years before when we had not yet found Lucetta’s killer. Mama always said that there was a worrier in every couple, and Martin was ours.