by Anya Seton
‘This is for me,’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘This man understands.’
Mr. Tibbins had flushed a dull red. ‘That’s not a proper book for a young woman to read! ’
‘Oh, but it is!’ said Fey, hardly conscious of him. ‘It’s true and good. It makes me strong.’ And her rapt eyes re-read a page.
‘Be not ashamed, women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest,
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.
‘The female contains all qualities and tempers them...
She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.’
Fey read this, and deep within her she felt the stirring and fluttering of the new life which was forming. It had no reality yet. She could not imagine it as a separate being. But this book seemed to give it meaning and dignity.
Mr. Tibbins, scowling, peered over Fey’s shoulder, then retreated sharply. ‘I Sing the Body Electric,’ the girl was reading, one of the very worst in the book. The flush ran up into his sparse grizzled hair. Could it be that this young woman was not a proper female at all, and he had been most indiscreet to give her so much attention? After all, he knew nothing about her. And somehow he had never mentioned her to Mrs. Tibbins. This sudden remembrance gave him new discomfort.
He cleared his throat harshly. ‘That’s an immoral book—it’s disgusting—and not poetry either!’
Fey looked up astonished. The little man was purple and quivering, above his mutton-chop whiskers his lips were indrawn to a pallid line.
‘I think it’s beautiful,’ she said, oblivious to his horrified glare, and, turning the page to ‘ One Hour to Madness and Joy,’ she added, ‘I want to buy it. I hope I have enough money.’
He bent over and snatched the book from her hands. ‘It’s not for sale. I’m sending it back!’ And he hid it behind him.
Fey was puzzled and hurt. All through these months Mr. Tibbins had been her one friend. He had helped her and she needed him. The blurred smoke-hazed evenings in the Arcadia Concert Saloon, the drab hours in her room at Mrs. Flynn’s, would not have been endurable without Mr. Tibbins and his books. There had been nothing personal between them—she had not thought of him as a man. She saw now that she must do so if she were not to lose all the books.
She got off the stool and gave him a sideways, pleading, and immensely flattering smile. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything—except what you’ve taught me, and I’m grateful.’
Mr. Tibbins, caught by her magnetism as men always were when she chose to use it, took an involuntary step toward her. He checked his hand before it touched her, and said coldly, ‘ It’s my business to know books——’ He sent her home that day with a volume of Mead’s Sermons, and Nosegays from the Garden of Piety, both of which presentations of the Christian life as a timorous morality, Fey dutifully plowed through in a vague bewilderment.
Mr. Tibbins had no idea that his protegee was married, since she told him nothing whatsoever about herself. He assumed that she was a governess; this fitted her air of quiet refinement and the faintly foreign intonation in her speech. After the Leaves of Grass episode and that flash of provocative awareness which he had seen, he had been disturbed. He began to dream about her, and awaken to stare resentfully at the mountainous form of Mrs. Tibbins beside him in the walnut bed.
To this Fey was oblivious. Like all pregnant women, she was caught up by a different life rhythm. No day had separate meaning in itself, but only as it marked inexorable progress toward the month of June. Her health was perfect. Her eighteen-year-old body, early trained to hardship and endurance, silently adjusted itself to its natural burden. Her mind had not the knowledge to initiate fears which might trouble that body’s own exquisite adjustment. In the Barrio Analco, pregnancy had been as usual as any other of Life’s stages, childhood or senility, and one accepted it as matter-of-factly.
She never returned to the unfinished cathedral, but on Sundays she went around the corner to Mass, and sometimes to confession. She felt no sympathy with the Irish priest; in the new and garish little church she experienced no mystical joy nor guidance; but the observance of her faith gave her a mild comfort.
And then on that February night in the Arcadia her unformed purpose and preparation found a goal.
All day a soft snow had been falling and melting on the streets, the lazy flakes drifting down like feathers. By evening the flakes no longer melted; they merged to form a thin glassy sheet over the sidewalks and cobblestones. Though it was Saturday night the Arcadia was only half-filled. The musicians played ‘You Naughty, Naughty Men’ from the Black Crook in a dragging and dispirited manner. No one applauded. Most of the waiter-girls including Fey sat in a doleful row beneath the stage, their services unsummoned. The manager bit his fingernails and wondered gloomily whether it was wise to renew the contract with the Alabama Minstrel Show which was preparing to go on. They were class, a real high-toned act, but it would be cheaper to get a couple a girls in tights. Let ’em wiggle around and kick their legs; that was good enough for this kind of crowd.
The Bowery entrance door opened and a large party came in, bringing with them a surge of perfume, the swish of taffetas and trills of self-conscious laughter. A short, stocky blond man in a black opera cape preceded the rest down the aisle between the tables.
The manager jumped and lumbered down off the stage, his face beaming. ‘Mr. Tower——’ he cried, his voice loud enough to inform all the other apathetic patrons of their good fortune. ‘Mr. Simeon Tower,’ he repeated, ‘this is indeed an honor.’
A thrill ran through the line of waiter-girls. They straightened and pulled up their skirts to the professionally seductive level. They arched their bosoms and curved their lips. ‘Gawd,’ said the girl next to Fey, ‘look wot the wind blew in. He must’ve got sick of his champagne and his gold plates and his pattee de foy grass uptown. Gawd, he don’t look so much,’ she added after avid inspection. ‘They say he’s most as rich as Vanderbilt, but he don’t look different from any other swell. He’s not married, though—chance for us—maybe,’ said the waiter-girl, heavily sarcastic and digging a sharp little elbow into Fey’s ribs.
Fey did not respond. She had drawn into a listening stillness; her gray eyes were fixed on Simeon Tower’s unconscious face.
The other girl gave a disgusted shrug and subsided. Nasty stuck-up piece the Spanish girl was, hardly give you the time of day.
Simeon Tower, said Fey silently. I wonder——She inspected him very carefully. There was no hurry. She saw a well-fed man in the late thirties, whose blond hair was thinning a trifle, and whose pale mustache was clipped and disciplined above a smiling mouth. He radiated a surface geniality; there were laughter lines around his small shrewd eyes, an expansiveness in the gestures he made with his well-kept hands. The nails, she saw, were shiny and pink, there was a large diamond ring on his middle finger. His shirt studs were huge black pearls, and his stickpin, was of diamonds and pearls. Everything about his dress was discreetly ornate, and this rich sparkle was reflected in his manner.
But I don’t believe he’s like that at all inside, thought Fey. She looked at his hands again, no longer seeing the pink shiny nails and the diamond. The hands were square and powerful, blunt workman’s hands, and yet the fingers were sensitive and unquiet. When he laid his right hand on the table beside his plate, the fingers seemed to shrink a little from the rough tablecloth. Fey raised her intent gaze to his face. He was smiling at the eager befrilled young woman beside him, a suggestive smile gay and pursuing, but his eyes did not smile. They were cynically remote, and behind the blue irises she saw power and something else—a curious frustration.
Why does he pretend? thought Fey, and yet she was not really puzzled. From that first moment when he walked through the door, she had felt an interior assurance. Here was a man whose surface was transparent for her. In dispassionate calmness she might understand him, there would
be few surprises, no matter how cleverly he concealed the secret springs.
She withdrew her gaze and considered now what she knew of him. The mention by Terry in the wagon at Fort Union, and mention in the newspapers and magazines she had read. ‘ Simeon Tower acquires the Transic Steamship Line.’ ‘A Visit to Mr. Simeon Tower’s Historical Gem Collection.’
The name had meant no more to her than any other, but now she remembered everything she had read of him. She watched him again, seeing that he devoted himself rather jerkily first to one young lady then another, and that they—vying with each other for his attention and resorting to rather frantic coquetry—displeased him, though he patted their plump hands, sipped from their wineglasses, and once rested his own hand on a satin-clad knee.
‘Hey, Spanish,’ hissed the manager, coming over to her, ‘get up and sing—what d’ye think I’m paying you for? ’
Fey hesitated. She did not dare jeopardize her job, but far more important would be the danger of Tower’s recognizing her later as an Arcadia waiter-girl. She had no idea how or when the ‘later’ was to be arranged, but it would be. For I shall make it happen, she thought, when the time comes.
She threw the end of the white lace shawl across her face and pinned it to the red rose. Now only her eyes showed.
‘Tell them it is a Spanish custom, they won’t know,’ she said indifferently in answer to the manager’s protest.
She borrowed the guitar and followed the manager.
‘Special attraction, Mr. Tower,’ the man whispered. ‘ Spanish girl, very high-born, covers her face like a Turk so she won’t feel ashamed singing before men.’
‘Indeed,’ said Tower. ‘How extremely quaint! I never heard that S-Spaniards were famous for their modesty with men.’ He crossed his legs and showed his strong blunt teeth.
The ladies tittered appreciatively.
Fey was standing close to him, waiting. In this first remark which she had heard him make she noted several things. His voice was harsher than she had expected and there was a suggestion of a stammer. She saw also that he was already bored with the impulse which had led him to take his party to such a place as the Arcadia. He would gather them all up soon and move on, and she did not wish to keep him. She sang her Spanish songs without much conviction, and her voice lacked its usual appeal. When she finished, there was only a feeble spatter of applause.
‘Can’t you sing something in English?’ said Simeon, without interest while he motioned for the check.
Fey looked directly at him and shook her head. ‘No ahora,’ she said. ‘Un día cantaré por te solamente.’
For an instant Tower was startled, not by her words which he took to be a conventional murmur of regret, but by the expression of her eyes. They were clear as gray water touched by sparkles of light and they rested on his face in greeting and intimacy. She lowered her lids at once and walked back to the stools by the stage.
Simeon Tower frowned. He was annoyed by happenings which he did not understand. Usually he focused all his power of concentration on such happenings until he did understand them and had reduced them to the commonplace. This incident of a look from a Bowery waiter-girl was too trivial.
He laughed a hearty, booming laugh, said, ‘This place is dull, let’s try the Oriental next,’ and paid the check liberally.
Fey glided over to the front windows and watched the party get into the waiting carriage. She watched the square bulky figure hand the ladies politely inside; his motions were quick and a trifle awkward like a machine run by imperfectly controlled power. She heard again his booming, unmirthful laugh. She saw his carriage start. It was a maroon brougham with yellow wheels ; there was both a coachman and footman on the box, and before them two cream-colored horses slipping and straining on the ice. She watched the brougham until it disappeared.
Chapter Ten
IN APRIL, Fey left the Arcadia Concert Saloon. She could no longer hide her condition, but she had managed to support herself all winter and save twenty-eight dollars for the baby. She had barely touched the sum Terry had left her. She had rolled it up in a muslin bag and hidden it in a crevice beneath the washstand, and for that little muslin bag she felt a sharp hostility. In all other ways the dingy room had become hers without reminder of the past.
There were no more visits to Mr. Tibbins’s Book Store because there had been a dreadful scene when that gentleman saw her one day with her cloak thrown open and her distorted figure unmistakable. He had turned on his protégée all the venom of outraged virtue and unsatisfied desire.
So Fey read the newspapers, and was several times rewarded by items mentioning Simeon Tower. She tried without much success to understand the stock market, gold speculation, and the Erie War, because his name was associated with these. Once he was denounced in an editorial and once given fulsome praise because he had endowed an orphanage on Staten Island.
One afternoon she walked uptown to look at the outside of his house at Twenty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. From Washington Square to Alexander Stewart’s marble palace at Thirty-Fourth Street, there were many huge mansions on the avenue, and Fey was for a moment disappointed that the massive Tower brownstone was not bigger than any of them, nor did she think it attractive. She was not yet accustomed to the inevitable brownstone facing lavishly ornamented with Italian iron grille-work and Greek cornices, nor to windows particolored by lozengeshaped stained glass in sulphurous yellows and magenta. It was, however, an impressive mansion surrounded by wide strips of grass, and it occupied nearly half the block.
She continued to stare at it from the sidewalk, noting every detail; the high stoop on which stood a pink alabaster urn filled with hydrangeas, the gold-fringed draperies at a first-floor window, the cast-iron stag coyly peering from behind a rhododendron in the southwest corner of the lawn.
As Fey was turning to leave, she saw a plump young woman approach from Fifth Avenue. She had fair ringlets and a high color, and she was well but not fashionably dressed in a striped taffeta edged with sealskin. There was something bouncing and good-natured and common about her. There was also an indecision, almost a furtiveness.
Fey drew back behind one of the ailanthus trees which shaded the sidewalk and watched the woman pause before the Tower mansion. She looked up at it, then down at an envelope which she twisted nervously in her hands. Then, having apparently renewed her courage, she walked very fast up the path and rang the doorbell. The door was opened by a butler, who received the note and shut the door. The woman returned down the path, her steps dragging. Fey had a full view of her face. There were tears in the big vapid eyes, and as she reached the sidewalk she looked back toward two large windows on the second floor and her face twisted in yearning. ‘ I hope he don’t mind, this once,’ she whispered. Fey heard her distinctly. So—she thought, and with a painful interest she watched the woman walk down the street.
After a moment Fey went, too. She was not disturbed. There would be a woman like that in his life, of course. In Santa Fe all the ricos, the caballeros, had women like this. Poor thing, thought Fey, and dismissed her. It made no difference.
She strolled down the avenue, adjusting her steps to their added burden, unconscious of the outraged stares from fashionable ladies. Women in that condition did not appear in public.
Fey breathed in the spring sunshine, and the pungent smell of geraniums from the window-boxes. She was content to wait, as she must wait.
On an afternoon in May, Fey went to 126 Second Avenue, the ‘New York Infirmary for Women and Children,’ to make inquiry. The three-story house was old and dingy outside, but the partitioned rooms and scrubbed halls inside reflected the farseeing progressiveness of the two intrepid sisters who had braved public censure and masculine scorn, not only to found this little hospital and training school, but by harrying a reluctant faculty into letting them become physicians at all. Doctor Elizabeth Blackwell had been the pioneer twenty years ago, and since then a hundred other women had followed the trail she had blazed. Three
of these were attached as residents to the New York Infirmary, besides Doctor Emily Blackwell, who had taken over the administrative burden since her sister was crusading in England.
Doctor Rachel Moreton was in temporary charge of the dispensary on the May day when Fey dragged her increasingly heavy body up the stone steps and into the first cubicle beside the door. There were no other patients waiting, and Fey suffered a spasm of nervousness as she walked to the cheap pine desk behind which a woman sat and wrote upon a pad.
‘Yes?’ said Doctor Rachel Moreton encouragingly, putting down her pen and looking up at the silent girl.
‘I——’ began Fey. She moved a step toward the desk, staring. ‘Are you a doctor?’ she said.
Rachel Moreton smiled; she was used to this. ‘Yes, indeed I am. Many women are now, you know.’ Her serene eyes examined the girl; they softened to quick sympathy as she saw what the trouble was. ‘Do sit down,’ she said gently. ‘Please don’t be frightened.’
‘No,’ said Fey, on a soft breath, ‘I’m not. But the sun is shining on your face. You’re beautiful. I think it’s you that I came here to find.’
‘My dear child—what a lovely thing to say!’ The doctor laughed, examining again the small square face, drawn and pale beneath an ugly red-plush shawl, but lit by brilliantly gray eyes.
‘I’m anything but beautiful, I fear,’ the doctor_ added, ‘but I’d like to help you. I’m so glad you came to us.’.
It was the keynote of Rachel Moreton’s character—the wish to help, and besides that there was an all-embracing tolerance not incompatible with occasional sharp irritation which she struggled to control, and she lived by a practical mysticism which belonged to her faith, for she was a Quaker.
She was forty-three, a big rawboned woman; silver-rimmed spectacles aided her farsighted eyes and made a ridge across the top of the aquiline nose, and her wiry brown hair was already streaked with gray. She was indeed anything but beautiful by ordinary standards, but Fey had seen deeper to a true loveliness of spirit, and to her Rachel was always beautiful, imbued by the calm grandeur of mountains and rocks.