by Marlowe Benn
Julia silenced his doubts the same way she’d quelled her own, just before following Glennis and a shaky Alice out of the apartment the other morning. She untucked the afghan covering the sofa and overturned the center seat cushion. A huge brown stain confirmed that a significant pool of blood had saturated its fibers.
“God in heaven,” Russell breathed.
Alice shifted toward Glennis for protection, in case the family’s wrath again turned on her as they fathomed the scale of the suicide charade. But the stain drove their thoughts elsewhere, to a more visceral revelation: Naomi was not the woman they thought they knew.
Chester eyed the graphic brown patch. “You’re saying Naomi was a whore, on top of everything else?”
“For pity’s sake,” Russell snapped. “She was your sister. Can’t you for once see her as a human being, a grown woman with a mind and life of her own?”
“Who was subjected to a vicious assault by a notorious incompetent,” Julia said. “Naomi suffered a violent, painful, lonely death.”
“No! Stop saying—” Vivian’s words dissolved as Winterjay pulled her against his chest.
He curled his shoulders to shield her. “Of course Naomi was human and entitled to her share of shortcomings, but she defied common decency in more ways than any of us can count. The Bible’s heartbreakingly clear on this: as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”
“Aren’t you listening, man?” Russell said. “Spare us the sermonizing. Naomi would be alive today if your wife hadn’t taken her to a butcher.”
“Quiet!” Winterjay tightened his grip to hush Vivian’s distress. “It’s slanderous, what you’re suggesting, and I won’t stand for it. You owe Vivian—us both—a profound apology. You as well, Miss Kydd. You’ve made a thoughtless and hurtful mistake. I don’t know what’s going on here, but my wife is a gentle soul who would never knowingly harm anyone.” He followed Julia’s eyes to the scarf that had fallen to the floor. “Not without extreme provocation.”
Julia wet her lips. “I’m afraid you’re the one who’s mistaken, Dr. Winterjay,” she said. “A worker at the so-called clinic recognized your wife. He remembered her from newspaper photographs when she was fighting to defeat women’s suffrage. He said she was the woman who made the arrangements for Naomi’s ‘service.’ I confirmed it this afternoon, with an old photograph Glennis gave me.” It had been one of several errands in Julia’s long day, during which she had gained a new respect for the harried lives of police detectives.
“Stuff!” Chester spat. “The fellow’s either a liar or an imbecile. No one would ever believe such a ludicrous story.”
“It’s not ludicrous,” Glennis said, though she too had scoffed on first hearing it.
“Vivian didn’t even know Naomi was pregnant,” Winterjay said. “None of us did. How could we? We’d be the last people Naomi would confide in.”
“That may be true. Nevertheless, your wife did know.” Julia spoke boldly to cover her humming nerves. There were great patches of guesswork in her hypothesis.
Vivian squirmed free. Hair disheveled and face flushed, she glared at Julia. “What a keen little spy you are, Miss Kydd.”
“What’s this about, Viv?” Chester asked the question that shone from every face.
Julia turned to Vivian with the others for an answer, knees weak with relief. If more questions had been asked of her, she’d have fumbled badly. She didn’t know the exact course of events, just enough to construct a plausible narrative. Now she hoped Vivian’s righteousness would rise up and finish telling the story.
Vivian scanned the roomful of puzzled faces. With a sweep of her shoe, she kicked away the chiffon scarf. “Naomi is the villain here, not me. You can’t imagine what I’ve had to endure these past weeks.” She dragged her thumb across both cheeks. “This whole nightmare began with a perfectly ordinary morning. I’d come home a few days early from Boston to prepare for that dreadful Talbot League party. I stopped by here to borrow a punch bowl, and I saw the most curious thing. Naomi, on her knees in the garden, retching into the asters like a perfect peasant. I was astonished. What on earth was ailing her? I was about to ask if she needed help when a horrible, horrible thought occurred. It seemed impossible and yet appallingly plausible, considering Naomi.
“I was in torment the rest of that day. I couldn’t sleep a wink all night. I knew her vile ideas about ‘inconvenient’ pregnancies. I knew exactly what she would do, and I had to stop her.”
“You telephoned her at the Union,” Julia said. “Asked her to meet you.”
Vivian nodded. “We met for tea. She admitted she was expecting, just like that. Well, tempers were soon short, so I went straight to the point. I begged her to confront the father and insist he marry her. Give herself and the poor child a chance at a future with dignity.
“And you know what she said to me? She said, ‘He’s married, Viv,’ with a strange look in her eye, and then she laughed, right in my face. I was aghast. I told her it was all the more important that she find a good home for the poor child, cursed with such a faithless father.” Vivian clamped a hand over her jaw and shook her head. She twisted to retreat again to her husband’s collar, as if that were the end of the story.
If only it had been. If only the sisters’ conversation had stopped a minute sooner, before either could provoke the other and set in motion the day’s fateful events. The family would be celebrating Naomi’s pregnancy now, wishing her and Russell a long and happy marriage. Julia could not glance his way, could not bear to know if he was thinking of this too.
“There you have it.” Winterjay stroked Vivian’s head. “Just as I said. My wife would never play a part in Naomi’s scheme. She abhors that abomination—we both do—with the deepest possible convictions. Moral, spiritual, ethical, legal. Nothing could ever alter that.”
Did Vivian, shrouded inside his denials, stiffen at his protests? Was there a hint of disgust, a flinching recoil? However angelic a portrait of his wife Winterjay clung to, Vivian knew the truth, and—if her logic was right—so did Julia. She tucked her knuckles against her aching throat to steady her hands. It was time to play her last crucial card, a huge bluff. Everything depended on what happened next. “Naomi’s pregnancy threatened more than your wife’s principles, Dr. Winterjay. It threatened her marriage and her family.”
“Complete and utter nonsense.” He dismissed her remark with an easy smile. “Nothing about Naomi could possibly threaten us. That much I know for certain.”
His calm conviction hung in the air. Julia was powerless. Only one person in the room could challenge his claim. Several seconds passed, but it felt like an eternity before Vivian reared back and flung off her husband’s arms.
“You fool! You know nothing. She put me in an unbearable situation. She made me choose. Choose between honoring every principle I hold dear and defending my husband and my children. Saving your precious face!”
“My face?”
Her shoulders twitched in a brief shudder at his bemused skepticism. “At first I didn’t understand it, the awful look in her eyes that shot straight through me when I asked about the father. There was contempt, oh, plenty of that, but also something else. Pity! She pitied me! As she sat there smugly refusing to listen to anything I said, it came crashing in on me. I felt such a fool, a mortified fool. It was not only me she was defying, but my husband. You, Edward! You!” She drove a feeble fist into Winterjay’s ribs.
His arms fell to his sides, patiently making no gesture to defend himself from the bewildering outburst. “I don’t understand . . .” He turned to the others with an embarrassed half smile, as if wanting to explain away her strange talk. His struggle between chivalry and confusion was painful to witness.
“Wait. No,” he said slowly. “It can’t be. Are you saying the baby was—”
“Yes. Yes. Yes!” Vivian’s words pounded the short distance between their faces. “How can you be so stupid?”
“Good Lord. I had no idea.” Winterjay looked about wildl
y. “How was I to know?”
“You? It was you? You had relations with . . .” Chester said, not so much a question as a slow comprehension of the unthinkable. Russell spread a hand across his face with a choke.
“Darling, please. I was lonely, miserable,” Winterjay said. “It had been so long. You’d been in no condition—”
“My own sister? You couldn’t be troubled to take your needs to some whore down—”
“Once!” Winterjay cut her short with an exasperated laugh. “One time. I swear just the once. I was in agony, you know—with you . . .” He nudged Vivian’s jaw so she would look at him. “It meant nothing, darling. Nothing at all. Less than a dalliance. You were at the lake with the children. I saw Naomi coming home late one evening as I was leaving upstairs. She seemed worn, unhappy, so I took down a bottle of brandy to cheer her up. I swear that’s all I had in mind. But then we had a few drinks, and nature took its course. That’s all. I left sometime in the night. I swear until now I’d forgotten all about it.”
Perhaps he had. This appalling candor squeezed Julia’s breath no less than Vivian’s strangling grip.
“For God’s sake!” Anger burst from Russell. “Just another whore to you? Only more convenient? What kind of a monster are you?”
Nolda made a sharp sound. Her mouth went flat, lips pressed shut in bloodless fury.
Winterjay ignored them both. “She didn’t resist, Viv. Not really. And believe me, she was no virgin. She may have been a spinster, but she knew what was what. And she was hardly one to simper about proprieties, not after all she did to flout them.”
As if Naomi’s will were a minor impediment to be brushed aside, rendered moot by his greater prerogative of need? What about the family’s vaunted respectability? He seemed to consider only his own and deem it intact, as if Naomi’s scorn for social norms absolved him as well. But she valued something much deeper, her right to act for herself, to accept or reject attentions as she chose. What about that? Had he dismissed that as mere feminine ruse?
Vivian’s face tightened in disgust. “She said you forced her, showed me the faded bruises. Of course, anyone could have done that, but she told me details, intimate things she couldn’t have known unless . . . Oh, I know you sometimes find comfort elsewhere, Edward. It’s disgusting, but what can I do? She was so horribly convincing. I had no choice. I couldn’t risk denying that the baby was yours. I had to accept she was telling the truth, that you had forced your attentions on her.”
Winterjay shrugged irritably. “That’s not fair, darling. Not at all. Yes, I was anxious for relief that night. I don’t deny it. But she let me in, drank my brandy. Surely she knew how I was suffering. She must have known. Why else would she open the door to me?”
Julia could think of a dozen reasons. Others could too, judging by the uneasy shuffle of feet around the room.
Winterjay seemed to hear none of it. “Oh, she put up a tussle, as they do, but I knew her game. And sure enough, beneath that plain dress she wore underclothes as wanton as any whore’s. When I saw that, well, what else was I to think?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Julia silently urged Vivian to answer it. There were plenty of reasons for Naomi’s small luxuries beyond what his vanity supposed. But Vivian only glared at him. “I was furious, outraged. I begged her to go away somewhere quiet and discreet until the baby was born. I pleaded with her to let that precious infant answer some poor couple’s prayers. It would have been only a few months, and I offered to pay for everything. But she wouldn’t listen. She outright slapped the table as I spoke. She was ruthless, vindictive, just terrible!”
“Come on, Viv,” Glennis exclaimed. “How can you put all the blame on her?”
Vivian spun on her heel. “Oh, I’m fully aware of my husband’s stupidity in all this. But you heard him. Men are fools, pathetically weak fools when it comes to their needs. Naomi should have known not to encourage him. We women need to be the sensible ones, Glennis. You’ll see soon enough.”
A full two seconds elapsed before Glennis’s eyes slid to Julia’s. They were huge with disbelief. It was a hoary old caution, passed down from mother to daughter for generations. Did Vivian really believe the power to control what happened in the bedroom lay in women’s hands? Or only the responsibility? That notion doubled men’s license for pleasure while diminishing their lovers’. From some distant corner of memory, Julia heard her mother’s laugh. She’d died before they’d spoken of sex, but hers would have been a different kind of counsel. She would have found the subject more merry than menacing.
Chester clapped impatiently. “All right, then. So Naomi refused to do the decent thing, and she paid a terrible price. Sounds like that’s the grim fact of the matter. Hate to say it, but seems a fitting end for her, killed by the very wickedness she defended.”
Chester’s resolve to declare the business over made the hairs at the back of Julia’s neck quiver. Once again he was dismissing Naomi’s death by pronouncing her the architect of her own fate. Worse was the sight of Winterjay nodding sadly, and Nolda and Vivian covering their mouths in mournful assent. Julia wanted to shout, stamp her foot, do anything to break the spell. Chester’s judgment, so smug and so self-serving, threatened everything she hoped yet to learn.
“Haven’t you heard a word of this, any of you?” Russell’s voice bellowed from the gloom beyond the lamplight. “Naomi died not because she ended her pregnancy but because a barbarian did it. Vivian took her to some wretch who used filthy instruments to gouge her open and—”
“No!” Vivian shrieked. Nolda swayed and bit down hard on Chester’s handkerchief.
“What’s wrong with you, man?” Winterjay said. “I don’t know why everyone insists on veering so cruelly off the mark. Miss Kydd may be right about Naomi’s wicked death, but you’ve heard my wife explain. She had nothing to do with it. She did everything she could to save that baby, to give some decent family the chance to adopt it, but Naomi would not be dissuaded. We all know her ferocious will.”
His confidence was something to behold, as if his wife’s moral conduct were a function of his character more than hers. To her horror, Julia saw Chester and Nolda nod gratefully at this sanguine assurance of Vivian’s innocence. She hurried to challenge it.
“Precisely the opposite is true, Dr. Winterjay,” Julia said. “It was your wife who insisted on the procedure, not Naomi. Your wife made the arrangements.”
He barely blinked, so quick was his dismissal. “That’s preposterous. Impossible on every level. For one thing, Vivian wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”
“She would and she does. Last spring the Woman Patriot published a story vilifying the number of abortions in the city. I noticed the very issue in your home a few weeks ago. Earlier today I spoke with the author, Martha LeMay. She confirmed that Vivian questioned her recently about her research. The woman was only too happy to give me an earful about American moral turpitude.”
Winterjay scoffed. “That can’t possibly be true. The woman’s mistaken or pulling your leg. I believe we’ve listened to enough of your innuendo and supposition, Miss Kydd. It’s time you left this house. You’ve quite abused our family’s hospitality. We took you for someone more honorable than you clearly are.”
“Quite so,” Nolda said fiercely, stepping forward to stand beside him. “This betrayal of our trust has gone on long enough. I must ask you to leave at once. You’ve sworn that what happened here will never leave this room, and we will hold you to it. Go. Now.”
Nolda’s imperious command nearly knocked Julia back a step. She knew all too well how egregiously she’d violated all protocols of courtesy. Her resolve withered, the floor beneath her feet changing to sand. She wavered, her next words melting fast.
A loud honking cough burst out from Glennis’s lungs. She crossed her arms and jutted up both thumbs from the crooks of her elbows. They fluttered absurdly as if to signal Don’t stop now! Don’t let her make you go!
Julia could have kisse
d her friend for the comical surge of courage. She shifted her footing and held her ground. “I will leave, most gladly, as soon as you’ve all heard me out. You might dismiss my word, Dr. Winterjay, but what about your wife’s? Why don’t you ask her for the truth? Do you trust her to speak honestly?” It was another gamble. Vivian might lie to Julia, but to her husband? She who put such store in men’s superior grasp of worldly nuance?
He gave a light laugh. “Vivian’s honesty is above reproach. She’d never willfully deceive me. Would you, my dear?” He turned for her confirmation.
Vivian gave Julia a look of utter revulsion. She reached for her husband’s hand.
“I tried, Edward. I tried desperately to reason with her. It’s true she didn’t plan to get rid of it. She had something even more vile in mind. She said she intended to have the child and raise it herself. ‘Just pray the baby favors me,’ she said. She actually laughed! It was monstrous, what she was planning. She would have wielded that child as a weapon over me, a weapon to shame and humiliate you, me, our children, and this whole family. I admit I’ve never felt such rage. So, yes, I did telephone Martha. She told me who to contact about someone to, to do it.” Her head swerved in disgust.
Julia slowly let out the breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Her guesswork held. Alice stifled a guttural sob, but no one else made a sound.
“My God,” Winterjay breathed.
“No. Naomi would never agree to that,” Russell said, edging his feet farther apart, as if preparing to defend the assertion by force if necessary. “Never.”
“She was impossible as ever,” Vivian said. “She’s always been stubborn, especially when she thinks she can look down her nose at poor suffering mortals like me. Once I realized she was locked into her mad scheme, quite beyond all reason, I had to put a drop of laudanum in her tea.” She peered frantically at the others, who only gazed back in silent shock. “Only a drop or two. To make her sleepy. I had to! What else could I do? You see my dilemma? She forced me.”