Rumors

by Anna Godbersen

  “Good morning,” her aunt Edith said, standing upon Diana’s entrance. She was wearing an old white dress with a narrow waist and somewhat more volume in the rear than was the fashion anymore. It caused Diana to imagine Edith as a young woman, when her hair still fell in dark little curls and when she still thought of the world as wide with possibilities.

  “Good morning,” Diana answered, crossing to the little grouping of bergère chairs where her aunt had been sitting with a tray of tea things.

  “You had better go straight up to your mother.” Aunt Edith’s eyes shifted downward, as though she disliked dwelling on what she was about to express. “You know she sometimes tends to the dramatic, but she has a bad look about her.”

  “Oh,” Diana said, receiving this comment as more of a rebuke than it had been intended.

  If she had been looking more closely, she might have seen that her aunt’s face in fact showed signs of real fear and distress for her sister-in-law. Although Edith did not share her brother’s wife’s love for a rigid social code, the women had been living under the same roof for some years and had come to a kind of mutual understanding. For Mrs. Holland’s part, she had always liked Edith as much as she liked anyone possessed of an important surname and a much-admired face, and of course she believed, like all the Old New York people, that family should have a united front and that any differences were to be kept to oneself.

  “Is she ill?” Diana asked after a pause. She was thinking of how little she had tried to engage Spencer Newburg last night, and how casually she had dispensed with Percival Coddington the day before, with a tinge of regret. Of course she could never love either of them. But the idea of having disregarded her mother’s desires so completely seemed less funny today.

  “I don’t know.” Edith observed Diana and spoke slowly. “She just says that she can’t leave the bed. I think you had better go now.”

  Diana nodded, though her feet were heavy. When she had at last reached the door, Edith added: “Don’t forget to tell her how much you charmed Mr. Newburg.”

  The way the older woman continued to look at her—hopefully, encouragingly—made Diana wonder, as she lingered on the threshold, if she looked as much like a girl in trouble as she was. For it was beginning to dawn on her, despite the clamoring of her wounded feelings, that if Henry wasn’t as in love with her as she had thought—if he wasn’t in love with her at all—then she was going to have to face some truly unappealing choices.

  It had never taken her so long to climb those stairs, and when she reached the second floor she slowed to a stop. The heavy carved door to her mother’s room was ajar, and she could see the diffuse light coming through the crack.

  “Diana…?” her mother called from inside the bedroom. Diana stepped forward. She leaned against the door and peeked past it. Her mother’s eyes were closed and her head rested back against a pile of white pillows. Her hair, which was usually so carefully arranged, if not also covered by a widow’s cap, now streamed down across her shoulders. Her face was very pale. “Are you there?” she called again, her voice still a little sharp even when it strained.

  A kind of agitation had come over Diana, and she knew that she couldn’t face her mother. She was being counted on to give assurances, but the reality of Henry not loving her was too new for her to hide; the rawness of her abject position would foil any attempts to conceal it.

  Elizabeth would have been able to maintain a façade. Elizabeth would have put her mother’s mind at ease, however temporarily. Diana, doubtful of her ability to do either of these things to even a slight degree, was already hurrying down the stairs. She was wrapping herself in a coat and scarf. She was moving past the front door onto the enclosed iron porch and down to the street, all the while fixating on the idea that she must get a message to her sister.

  Coming out of the downtown Western Union office a few hours later, Diana hardly felt any better but was slightly warmed by the sense that she had something to look forward to. She had cabled her sister, via Will Keller, all the latest traumas and was now somewhat comforted by the vague notion that she might receive an inspired response. Perhaps Elizabeth would know a reason her little sister’s life was all coming apart at the seams. At the very least, Diana’s many weighty problems no longer felt like her problems alone, and for this reason she was moving with some of her characteristic chin-up confidence. She was also in a part of town where she was unlikely to meet any of her acquaintances, and she felt somewhat freed from her own identity and so quite able to walk without subterfuge.

  This assumption was swiftly put away by the sound of her own name, spoken not particularly loudly but with perfect clarity by someone following her through the brass-framed plate glass doors of the office and into the bright, cold afternoon. She paused before turning to face the stranger. The sun was in her eyes, and it took a few more seconds before she recognized Davis Barnard. He was wearing the same fur hat as the last time they’d met, and one of his sharp dark brows was cocked.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Barnard,” she said. The spirit of her sister must have arrived somehow, for though she had no more happy faces, the corners of Diana’s mouth sprang up into something like a polite smile. “I’m surprised to see you so far downtown.”

  “I had to send a telegram. Can’t be too careful of spies in the newsroom, my dear. Anyway, I was about to say the same thing to you,” Barnard answered dryly, with an amused twist to his thin lips. “Maybe the rumors are true, and you are cabling Elizabeth in London, where she has run off to marry the fifth in line to the British throne?”

  Diana had always considered herself a good fibber, but she knew that the expression she wore now could disguise nothing. She turned her face to the street, with its worn cobblestones and indifferent midday traffic.

  “Oh, Diana.” Barnard lowered his eyes, in which Diana momentarily caught a glimpse of something like shame. “I didn’t mean to make light about Elizabeth.”

  His voice quieted when he pronounced the name, and he watched two men in frock coats pass. They were dressed for business, but they were as plain as the buildings with their workaday painted wood signs and small glass storefronts that lined the street.

  “It’s all right.” Diana met his eyes to show him that what she said was true.

  “But I’m glad to have caught you—I think you have some information that I would give a great deal to know….”

  Diana, sensing that she was again nearing the topic of her sister and thus a position requiring a level of deception that she was not currently capable of, quickly turned hot. “I really don’t know what you mean.”

  “The young lady accompanying Carey Lewis Longhorn at the opera last night?” Barnard urged gently. “I heard you were talking with her in the ladies’ lounge. Everyone was buzzing about it, and of course they all want to know who she could be.”

  “Oh.” Diana bit her lip. With all the other heartrending going on, she had nearly forgotten about running into Lina, and had entirely neglected to tell Claire how grand her little sister looked. But reading it in the columns would be even better.

  “I’m sure it feels a little uncomfortable, for a lady like you…but perhaps this will help.” Her interlocutor produced an envelope. It was edged with gold, and when she peeked inside, she saw a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Thank you,” Diana said, taking it. So this was how life was, she thought with a faint smile: It wore you down until you emerged at its wildest, most unexpected ends. “I believe the young lady you were speaking of is named Carolina Broud,” Diana began cautiously. “She met Elizabeth in Paris in the spring, and was offering me condolences.” Once she had begun telling the lie, Diana found she didn’t mind at all and even wanted to spin it further. “She’s an orphan, you know, and they quite understood each other, having both lost fathers. The Broud money was from copper smelting, I believe, and it has brought Carolina to the city with the idea of seeing something of society….”

  “And is the old bachelor looking fo
r love again?”

  Diana tried her best to look scandalized and then replied that she hadn’t the faintest.

  “Ah, well. It’s an excellent item just the same. Can I offer you a ride home, Miss Di?”

  Diana knew that it wouldn’t look right, but then she told herself that things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you. The air was bracing and the walk back uptown would take far more strength than she had. Barnard gestured to his phaeton across the cobblestone street and, with the memory of the gilt-edged envelope still fresh in her mind, Diana found herself disinclined to flat-out refuse any of his offers.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Though I must insist that you not be too familiar. Diana is my given name.”

  Barnard tipped his head, as though to say, “As you wish,” and then Diana accepted his proffered arm.

  Twelve

  TRANSATLANTIC CABLE MESSAGE

  THE WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH COMPANY

  TO: Will Keller

  ARRIVED AT: 25 Main Street,

  San Pedro, California

  1:25 p.m., Sunday, December 17, 1899

  Henry is not in love except perhaps with Penelope—think I may have been very selfish—two servants left—no monies whatsoever—Mother won’t get out of bed—she’s not well and I don’t know what to do—help me—D

  THE DINNER ELIZABETH SERVED THAT NIGHT would be far superior to the scarcely touched beans of the previous evening. For one thing, there would be real meat—steaks bought that day in town—and potatoes roasted in a pan over the fire and Waldorf salad. She had gone and purchased these items herself, that afternoon. She’d purposefully avoided the post office, which had previously been her single, obsessive destination.

  “Did you get a letter today, Mrs. Keller?” they had asked her at the general store. They believed that she was Will’s wife, which was what she had told them to explain her presence out there alone with two men, and they knew how frequently she asked if there was anything for her or her husband in the mail. She didn’t like this lie—it was against everything she had been brought up to believe to live as man and wife without being married—but it was preferable to publicly appearing to do so.

  “Oh, no,” Elizabeth had replied, blushing under her hat. “I’m just here for groceries today,” she added softly.

  The other reason was that Will was going to help her with the cooking, which he seemed to know something of, since his living quarters had been so close to the Holland kitchen and because, when he was thirteen and growing so quickly, it had been necessary for him to become good friends with their cook and learn from her. It was Will who insisted they should celebrate. Finding oil meant that soon they would be living at a whole new level, and this made him feel much better about spending some of his savings to have a real dinner. Elizabeth had gone to pick up those necessary things while he and Denny began to put together their makeshift rig, trying to make it just as safe and effective as one of those huge ones the big oil companies used.

  On the long walk back to the cabin, she had reflected on Will’s ability to save. He was always working hard, she knew that, but it was an irony she could not fail to appreciate that he had accumulated money while the family that employed him frittered theirs away. And then he had worked to save more while he waited for her in San Francisco. There was money for steak, when it was called for, and she mused in a far-off way about how Will, not Henry, would have been the better person on whom to pin the family’s hopes for salvation.

  That hardly seemed to matter anymore, though. Now that she saw how assuredly Will would make her rich again, she found she didn’t even need it. She knew what money would mean for her mother, for the rest of the family, but for her it no longer held any power. It almost made her laugh—she found herself smirking as she pulled back the canvas flap that served as a door to the cabin—how much she had worried over losing her dresses and her objects and all her trinkets and jewels. Now that they were gone, she never thought of them.

  She continued thinking about all that constituted the boy she loved until he returned, his eyes bright with excitement and his whole body animated with the work of the day. There was that usual smell of sweat and soap when he came through the door, and a new one—it was something like sulfur, and it reminded Elizabeth of intense industry and all the other things he was cut out for.

  “Lizzy,” he said. He took the paring knife with which she had been removing the skins of the potatoes out of her hand and laid it on the table, and then his arms took her up. After the kiss he met her eyes, and his lips were drawn back so far it was impossible to think he might ever frown again.

  There was a new shine there and a new buoyancy in his step that reminded her of that time in their lives when they first admitted they were in love. That it was not some childhood game in which they imagined being married as grownups but something far more real. That was when she had ordered a delivery entrance installed between the kitchen and the carriage house so that she could slip down to see him at night. Neither of them had yet turned sixteen, and the complications of their situation had not fully dawned on them.

  “Where’s Denny?” She rested her head on his chest and took in a warm breath. He was holding her to him with his hand and had turned to assess what still needed to be done for dinner.

  “I sent him into town for whiskey.” Will picked up a piece of chopped apple from the table and put it in his mouth.

  “Oh, I could have gotten that!”

  “A real lady, buying alcohol like any roustabout?”

  Elizabeth pursed her lips. “I’m not sure they have those scruples out here,” she said.

  “No, but you do.” He swallowed the apple and then gently tapped her nose. There had been moments since Elizabeth’s arrival in California when she felt self-conscious about all her old manners, which were more difficult to discard than the desire for things or the instinct to marry where money already was. But then there were moments like these when Will put her at ease and when she knew that all the things that constituted her self were as sweet to him as he was to her. He kissed her forehead, and then they continued to work at the celebration dinner without words in the flickering lamplight.

  It was into this pleasant silence that Denny Planck returned. Elizabeth turned and acknowledged him with a small smile and nod as he came through the door and thought, as she often had before, how he might be handsome if it weren’t for the skin of his cheeks, which were pitted with smallpox scars, and his somewhat oversize ears. For his height gave him natural advantages, and there was a sweet willingness to follow others in his brown eyes. He was heavier than Will and less articulate, but Will liked and trusted him, and that was enough to make her like him, too.

  “Smells good,” he said with a grin.

  “Denny!” Elizabeth’s laugh rang out. “We haven’t even started cooking yet.”

  Will went over and threw an arm over his friend’s shoulder. Elizabeth wasn’t sure she’d ever seen her sweetheart in such a state of conviviality. There was confidence in his every movement and a looseness in his limbs.

  “Looks good, then,” Denny replied, wearing the same grin. “Here,” he went on, removing a bottle wrapped in paper from the crook between his arm and his side. “I brought the whiskey.”

  “Bravo!” Will took the bottle and unwrapped it and threw the paper into the fire. Grabbing three of the little mismatched mason jars, which had once held small amounts of jam or sardines, he poured them each a finger of brown liquid. Then he passed the jars around and raised his high. “To our success!”

  They clinked their glasses and drank. Elizabeth had been known to drink a moderate amount of champagne at balls in New York, but she had never tasted whiskey, and it burned her tongue. She didn’t mind, though. It all felt like part of the lucky new sunlight that had fallen on them.

  “To our success,” Denny seconded as he placed the little jar back on the table. “Oh, and Will, there was this for you at the post office. They told me Mrs. Keller�
��—here Denny winked in a way Elizabeth would have preferred he’d not—“might have missed it on her earlier foray into town.”

  Elizabeth pretended to go back to mixing together the walnuts and apples and celery in the chipped blue tin bowl as Will set down his glass. He moved away to rip open the sealed yellow telegram, and she turned to watch him even as Denny sat down at the table and picked up a handful of walnuts, which he began shoveling into his mouth. She wanted to stop wondering what the contents of the telegram said, but found that she couldn’t bring her attention back to the salad. After a moment, Will looked up at her and she saw that the celebration had gone out of his face.

  “Oh, Liz,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  Will looked at Denny, who was absorbed in pouring himself a second glass of whiskey, and back to Elizabeth. He tilted his head toward the door, indicating that she should follow him. “Denny, we’ll be right back, all right?” Then, summoning some of the previous gaiety: “Slow down with the whiskey or we won’t have anything left to celebrate with.”

  Denny acknowledged this comment with a laugh, and then they left him and went out into the darkness. They walked for several moments, away from the low light of the cabin, before either of them spoke. All of the orange had gone out of the sky while Elizabeth had been inside, and where the purple up above had turned to black, pins of light had started to emerge.

  Will’s voice was the first to break the quiet. “I knew this would happen,” he began quietly. “I just didn’t think it would be so soon.”

  “What did it say?” The look on his face provoked a feeling of dread, and she could barely even whisper now.

  “It was from Diana. She says she needs help, and that your mother is not well.”

  Elizabeth felt the cold sweep over her body. “Is it serious?”