by Marlowe Benn
What on earth was behind this shift? What did he really want? Of course they were fond of one another, but neither had ever expressed the slightest yearning for a more fixed relationship. David loved the freedom a remote marriage gave him. Even if Helen had a better offer and now wanted a quick divorce, why suddenly thrust his arrangement with Julia into such upheaval? She felt a small stab of resentment, even betrayal. It had been so nice, so easy; why jigger that? The mere logistics of marrying—taking into account Christophine and their lovely flat—made her head spin.
Did he think she secretly pined to be married, that her claim of preferring independence was simply a brave front hiding private bouts of weepy loneliness? Did he feel her honor was now at stake, obliging him to make the proverbial honest woman out of her? As if their present arrangement did not already embody, to her mind, the perfect honesty. She hadn’t thought him inclined to either strain of romantic condescension.
She’d have to inform him of her own calamitous news straightaway. Some men would balk, reluctant to take on a wife who’d burden their resources rather than expand them. David, though, might welcome her disaster. His generosity would be patient and reasonable and overpowering. David was a shrewd businessman; he used his considerable wealth to acquire what he wanted. That was why their present understanding was so perfect: neither had the upper hand, and neither was beholden to the other. Marriage would end that. A wife—the more absent and ambivalent the better—ensured his freedom but at the expense of hers.
Marriage would also end, however, Julia’s very real threat of drudge and poverty. Her head throbbed. She frowned at the floral behemoth filling the hall. Its fragrance was suffocating.
She squeezed past, leaving the flowers to be dealt with in the morning. Perhaps Mrs. Cheadle would be a saint and move them somewhere more appropriate, like the lobby of a grand hotel. Groping for the doorknob, Julia knocked over an envelope balanced there. Without a hall table nearby, Mrs. Cheadle seemed to think this a handy place to leave messages. Another birthday surprise?
Inside the plain white envelope was a typed message identical to those Alice Clintock had dumped out onto Naomi Rankin’s desk. Stop sticking your nose where it don’t belong if you know whats good for you.
For heaven’s sake. Julia’s birthday, such as it had been, was well and truly over.
CHAPTER 17
Julia did not sleep well. At five she draped her burgundy shawl, the one crumpled beyond any ability to restore, over her shoulders, slid past the floral blockade, and made her way across the dark apartment in hopes of finding Mrs. Cheadle’s first pot of coffee. Julia could smell it, so keen was her hope, but she was too early. She stared into the murky kitchen, wondering if she could manage to make tea, but was ashamed to admit she had only a vague knowledge of American cookers and might botch it spectacularly. (The kitchen was strictly Christophine’s realm at home, territory ceded in exchange for Capriole’s new studio.) She’d seen a faint hint of early light leaking under the library door and could wait there to ambush Mrs. Cheadle at the first clatter of a kettle.
Julia retraced her steps, silent as a thief, past the hall leading to Philip’s bedroom at the other end of the apartment. The library would be chilly, but it offered better fare than the hopeless Arlen novel. She pushed open the doors and bit down on a cry.
Philip sat angled low in his smoking chair, pulled around to face a lively fire, whose light Julia had mistaken for dawn. Curled in the other chair, also angled toward the fire, was a woman. She was forty at least. Hair the implausible color of new pennies billowed down her back. They held cups and saucers—the coffee Julia thought she’d imagined. He was shirtless; she wore a man’s dressing gown. The woman brushed Philip’s arm, and his murmuring stopped. Following her nod, he turned.
“Ah.” He set his coffee on the floor. “Good morning. You’re up early.”
Julia was too dumbfounded to reply.
He stood, spilling both cats onto the carpet. “May I introduce my friend Mrs. Macready? Leah, this disheveled young thing is Julia.”
He wore black silk pyjama trousers knotted loosely at the waist. His bare chest was smooth and muscled, the physique of a fencer more skilled than the dilettante he professed to be. With a turban and glaze of oil, he could easily pass for Nijinksy in the firelight; Julia’s initial comparison had been apt. Many would have found his appearance indecent, but she suppressed a smile. A Beardsley man was no more likely to simper in girlish modesty than she was.
The woman handed him the dressing gown draped over the arm of his chair. She held her own together at her waist as she crossed the room. Her hand was warm and carried a perfume Julia didn’t recognize, more spice than flowers. “Happy birthday, Julia.”
Who was she? Philip’s mistress? Julia hoped he would have the tact not to say so.
“Mrs. Macready is an old and dear friend,” he said.
“More dear than old,” the woman clarified. Dark green silk rippled beneath the folds of her charcoal robe, its sleeves rolled into fat cuffs. She found the belt and secured it with a neat tug and loop. Each hand flashed with rings. “Would you like some coffee?” She gestured toward a white pot on the hearth tiles.
She dispatched Philip to the kitchen for another cup. “No need for alarm,” she said the moment he was gone. “We keep to ourselves. He talks well of you, you know. No, really, Julia. He’s quite sick about the will business and—”
This astonishing speech dissolved into a brilliant smile as he returned.
Julia imagined how foolish she must look, hair tousled as a schoolboy’s, shoulders slack beneath a wrinkled shawl, pyjamas billowing over bare feet. Philip’s dark head, silhouetted against the fire as he bent for the coffeepot, suggested something safe to say. “How is Lillian?”
Mrs. Macready answered for him. “Hoarse as a crow. She can barely squawk, which frustrates her no end. Nancy says the house has never been so peaceful.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Julia said. “I mean that Lillian’s ill.” Philip filled the third cup and handed it to her.
“She asked again about your spat with Philip over his theories of crime,” Mrs. Macready said. “It amuses her, and Philip reenacts it with great relish. He’s quite a good mimic.”
Julia said nothing at this predictable news of aunt and nephew’s sport at her expense. With an enormous desire to be gone, she accepted the coffee and mumbled thanks in hasty retreat. By the time she pulled the library door shut behind her, they had returned to their chairs, legs again stretched toward the fire, feet mingling on the hearth, cats circling in their laps. The scene was every bit as unsettling as at first glimpse.
Julia walked around the side of the Rankin house, past the loggia sheltering a black motorcar, through a honeysuckle arbor whose fragrance had passed, and down a flight of shallow brick steps to the basement apartment, where Naomi and Alice had lived. Movement at the bay window overhead caught her eye: Nolda Rankin, watching her approach. Without looking up Julia edged nearer to the house, out of view.
Glennis opened the apartment door before Julia could knock. Alice stood beside a frayed velvet sofa, its seat cushions covered with a brown crocheted afghan tucked firmly into place.
“Look,” Glennis said. “It was left in the letter box during the night. Alice got one too.” She held out two typed warnings identical to Julia’s. Alice said hers had been tucked under a brick on the stoop, which worried her because few people knew Chester had finally allowed her to return to the apartment for a few days—against his better judgment, he’d said, and only until she could find another place to live.
An hour earlier Glennis had telephoned to say she’d offered to sort through Naomi’s things, separating valuables the family should keep from things to be discarded or bundled for charity. Her voice jumpy with hope of clues to Naomi’s last days, Glennis urged Julia to come and help. She said nothing about Julia’s birthday or the business with Philip. Happy to keep her personal tumult to herself, Julia left without s
eeing or hearing any further sign of Philip or the phantom Mrs. Macready. If not for the cup and saucer she had returned to the kitchen, she might have thought she’d dreamed the extraordinary predawn encounter.
“I received one too,” she said. “Philip’s housekeeper said the envelope was pushed through the mail slot sometime before she retired.”
“More threats?” Alice spoke through a cage of fingers. “Someone wanted to silence Naomi, and now they want to frighten us. They must be afraid we’ll discover something. But what?”
Madame Sosostris could not have produced a better shivery gasp than Glennis’s. Julia peeled off her gloves. “Maybe an answer will turn up among her things. How do you want to proceed?”
Glennis looked around, shoulders hunched, overwhelmed by the task, but before she could answer, Nolda Rankin emerged from a dark hallway behind them. “Don’t spend much time down here, girls,” she said. “The air’s unhealthy, and I doubt you’ll find anything to save. Some of the furniture might have another few serviceable years left.” She looked about with narrowed eyes. “Most things, though, like this filthy sofa, are beyond disgusting. I want it hauled away and burned. It was a disgrace twenty years ago. The beds too. Strip the linens and leave them to be taken out as well.”
“We’re only looking for Naomi’s personal things,” Glennis said. “After Miss Clintock takes what’s hers, no one cares what you do with the rest of this rubbish.” She clearly resented her sister-in-law’s meddling, though her rebuke also thoughtlessly scorned the place Alice called home. If Alice felt the sting, she hid it well. Her eyes flickered but not her expression.
In fact, the apartment was small and spare. The ceiling seemed to hover just above their heads, and it creaked when someone passed overhead. A musty smell put Julia in mind of root cellars and garden sheds. The only window was shadowed by the wide overhanging bay upstairs. Even with its starched cotton curtains pushed aside, it let in little of the day’s sunshine and none of its autumn warmth. The seating area held only the sofa, a low table covered with pamphlets and papers, and an oversize rocking chair. At the end of a dim hallway behind the rocker was a door of rough-cut boards whose frame skimmed the ceiling. Its bulk suggested it connected to the basement and house above, not merely to another room in the dank apartment. This guess was confirmed when Nolda Rankin disappeared through the door as quietly and abruptly as she had come.
“Here’s Naomi’s room, though I doubt you’ll find much of value.” Alice led them to a windowless bedroom so small the three of them could barely crowd in. “She sold most of what she had. But almost everything in the apartment was hers. I brought only personal things and a roasting pan. If it were worth anything, we’d have sold that too.”
Alice pulled a bead-weighted string to switch on a small ceiling light bulb. Their shins brushed against a narrow iron bedstead. Two fruit crates were stacked beside it, each filled with books and papers. On top sat a round clock and a lamp with an insect-stained cloth shade. Pushed against the foot of the bed was a pine bureau topped with four small framed photographs of Naomi with women Julia didn’t recognize. The top drawer’s pull had been replaced with a nail. A curtain of ticking covered the narrow entrance to what was likely a closet or recessed shelving. Except for a shapeless gray sweater and a Children’s Aid Society calendar, both hung on nails, the once-white walls were bare.
Glennis’s face went slack with shock.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Alice said. Julia leaned her knees into the bed’s thin mattress to let her pass. “I’ll be packing my things across the hall.”
“Dreadful,” Glennis said. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
Julia eyed the moth holes and yellow stains of the bed’s wool blanket, wondering when the linen had last been laundered. Fortunately she’d worn her oldest frock, expecting something like this. “It shouldn’t take long. Just look through the bureau drawers and the closet. She may have a little jewelry tucked away. And keep an eye open for a diary or private keepsakes. If she had secrets, here is where they’d be.”
Glennis sucked her lower lip. “Poor Naomi. I don’t know which breaks my heart more, the way she died or seeing how she lived.”
Julia gave Glennis’s fingers a quiet squeeze for courage and went to sort things in the main room.
An old sideboard stood against the far wall. With a round claw-foot table and three mismatched chairs, the area passed for a dining room. In the sideboard’s two top drawers, Julia found four cotton napkins, clean and folded, six partly burned candles, three pencils, mismatched sheets of paper of varying sizes, a pair of scissors with one of the points broken off, and a cigar box containing basic sewing and darning supplies.
Below the drawers, two shallow shelves held assorted crockery, none of it matching, and a tarnished pair of silver candlesticks. Julia placed the candlesticks on the table and moved on to inventory the kitchen: an old-fashioned sink, icebox, and oil stove in a grimy alcove. She found tin canisters of flour, sugar, and oatmeal; an unopened tin of lard; a packet of Uneeda biscuits; a white enamel bread box, empty; and a bowl of green pears. Behind a red gingham curtain in the cabinet were a squat white teapot; an assortment of dishes; a box of cutlery, its silver plate rubbed down to brass; and a chipped pickle crock holding utensils. Overhead stretched a thin rope with a dozen or so clothes pegs at one end. Everything told of a mundane and cheerless life. Just as well Glennis would not see it close up.
“We don’t have much.”
Julia wheeled so abruptly she nearly knocked Alice over. They both apologized as Alice filled the kettle. She lit the stove, set the pot on the water-stained wood counter, and measured tea from a small packet. “We’ve been here nearly a year,” she said in answer to Julia’s question. “Naomi took me in when I had nowhere else to turn.”
This was the sort of phrase that Julia’s London friends sometimes mocked, declaiming the lament in weepy falsetto voices from cheap novels left in subway carriages. Over her shoulder Alice gave a slant smile that promised to explain in a moment. Was this the endless chore of a suffragist, Julia wondered, to tell her story to curious ladies untouched by poverty or struggle? Told a hundred times, was it now polished smooth as stone? She waited, silent as the teakettle began to rattle and hiss.
“I left my husband in ’16, more than eight years ago now,” Alice said. “That’s how it turned out, though I meant to return. I left a note and three fresh loaves of bread, plus a full pot of beans and a basket of apples, and I took my children to stay with my sister in Clarksville. Then I rode the train to Washington to walk that picket line at the White House. It was the most glorious time of my whole life, those three weeks.”
Alice made the tea and carried the pot to the table. They sat across from each other and held the hot tea to their faces. “By then I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t go. I’d seen too many girls put to work so their brothers could get a few more years of schooling. Then those poor girls get auctioned off like slaves to husbands willing to pay for their upkeep, because their papas decide the poor things’ wages don’t cover the food they eat. Before they know it, those girls have babies of their own and worse work than most factory jobs, which at least give you Sundays off. If a woman gets fed up and wants better, or even if she tries to improve her lot on her own somehow, she’s beaten for sassing off, and no policeman in seven counties will believe her story or help her even if he did.”
Alice’s gray eyes turned to flint. “Three weeks. That’s all I was gone. I took just half of the money from the cigar tin and bought a train ticket and as many days in a rooming house as it would cover. But when I came home, he wouldn’t let me in, wouldn’t even talk to me. He’d already been to the sheriff, and do you know he had me declared unnatural, unfit to mother my own children, just for going off like that? Before I knew it, he’d divorced me, claimed I abandoned him with wanton intent. He married Sally Kraus soon as that ink dried, and neither one would let me so much as say goodbye to my children. Three
boys I had—have—” She corrected herself fiercely. “Oldest was eleven, and my girl was the baby, just three that summer. She won’t know me now, only the lies they tell her. My husband made good and sure I had nothing, not a penny, not a friend, not even my good name. Can you think what he tells my boys about me?”
Julia felt Alice’s grip and saw her own arm stretched across the table, her manicured fingers covered by Alice’s scarred and reddened ones. Who had reached for whom? Too stricken by the story to remember, she reversed their hands and stroked the older woman’s knuckles.
“I near went mad,” Alice went on. “Everything I ever knew was behind me, locked away. I had no choice but to start walking. Eventually I made my way back to Washington because that was where you wanted to be if the vote mattered to you. I washed dishes and ironed shirts in boardinghouses across Ohio and Pennsylvania, working my way east. That’s when I knew the movement was going to be my life from then on. I could never start over with a husband and children again, not after what had happened. The party, the other women, they’re my family now.”
She slid free of Julia’s hands to take up her tea. “When the war came and the men went off, a few of us found better work that wasn’t just squab jobs, but they fired us as soon as the boys came home. Even if you could hold on to one of those good jobs, they paid you half as much as a man. Half. Or worse. There’s no justice, Miss Kydd. I decided that if I was going to work hard and still scrimp for a meal and roof over my head, I might as well make sure the work had some reward to it more than measly wages. During the war I learned bookkeeping and clerking. That’s what I do for the Union. I take notes at meetings, keep the accounts. I manage our financials, what little we have.” Her eyes rested on Julia, but her gaze was elsewhere.