The Underground River

by Martha Conway

  “Grazie, grazie, che il buon Dio con voi,” Giulia’s father called back.

  I watched them until Giulia’s little head became just a dot in the distance. Then it was gone. The lamplighter began lighting the lamps alongside the river, and when I looked out at the water again I saw that it was streaked with the deep purples and blues of sunset. The cool evening air seemed to blow down from the town and up from the river both at once, and I pulled my blanket closer around my shoulders and stood.

  I needed to find Comfort. She was wearing her chartreuse dress. She had her favorite hair ornament in her hair, a silver bird with a turquoise eye. I tried to remember other details. But although I stumbled barefoot along the debris on the beach, looking at each face I passed and at all the faces of the waterlogged dead pulled up from the river, I could not find her.

  • • •

  Early the next morning, the Cincinnati City Council appointed twenty-one men to retrieve the remaining bodies from the river. Some men cut back the saplings and brush that grew down into the water in order to make the bank wider, while others pulled the bodies onto flat sheets and arranged them faceup with scraps of clothes or personal articles alongside them to help with identification. By the time I got back to the riverbank, a large tent had been erected over the bodies to protect them from the sun: for April, the weather was unusually mild.

  The corpses were laid out with their feet pointing toward the river like an accusation, and their clothes were stained with mud and blood. The woman in front of me, Mrs. Alma Stoke, her face swollen with crying, pinched her nose with her fingers as she looked at the bloated faces. The night before Mrs. Stoke and I had both been given lodging in the home of a city gauger named Nedel. Mrs. Stoke was looking for her husband and three children.

  When we came to the last row in the tent, a man with a city emblem on his coat said, “There’s more at the morgue, taken last night.”

  This was a one-story yellow brick building a few blocks away. A line had formed at the door, and we were led inside in groups of five. Here the bodies seemed more dignified, lifted off the ground and laid out on low tables with sheets up to their necks and their hair brushed. The floor and the lower halves of the walls were tiled with teal-blue tiles, and in the middle of the floor stood a drain.

  Comfort was not among those on the tables, but Mrs. Stoke found her husband and two of her children. Before that moment the five of us looking were silent, and then all at once her wails filled the room, echoing off the tiled floor. I turned my good ear away from the noise and found myself staring at a metal counter with unmarked toe tags, needles and sewing materials, a bone saw, and other tools of the trade. Bile rose in my throat. I was beginning to feel desperate.

  Back out on the sidewalk, a boy with a brown jug gave me half a cup of water even though I didn’t have a penny to pay him. People were gathering with signs: “Looking for: one child, gray dress, yellow stockings, called Anna Weaver” and “John and Edward Sunbury lodging at 2 West Circle and looking for their mother” and “Frank Jewett! I am alive and staying on Cross Street at Mrs. Vernon’s, on the corner.” Horses pulling wagons with company names painted on the sides passed me in a steady stream, and I stood there staring at them for a long time, not knowing what to do next. She knows how to swim, I reminded myself, but I was by now sick with anxiety.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t the girl with the ephemeral smile.”

  I turned to see a man walking toward me with shoulder-length curly blond hair: Mr. Thaddeus Mason. His left arm was in a sling made of soft black cotton dotted with irregular specks like the night sky on a very clear night if stars were light green and not white. He held a jar of jam in his injured hand and a spoon in the other.

  A warm flood of relief washed over me. “Mr. Mason!” I said.

  “Thaddeus,” he corrected as he led me to a bench in the shade. “My dear, I was worried about you!” I could tell he hadn’t given a thought to me until he saw me this moment, but I didn’t mind: I was just glad to be speaking to someone I knew.

  Thaddeus licked his spoon and put it in his jacket pocket. Despite being an actor and not rich, Thaddeus always dressed well. Today he was wearing a dark green jacket with a wide striped tie and light-colored trousers—certainly borrowed, and yet the clothes seemed tailored to fit him. When I asked him what had happened to his arm, he said, “A little sprain from my fall; nothing serious. Now, what news do you have of your beautiful cousin? Please tell me you are waiting here for her, that she’s just gone to post a letter or to collect a check.”

  I don’t know why actors are always going to the post office looking for money in the mail; in my experience they either get paid promptly in person or not at all. Two young women came strolling toward us arm in arm, taking care to keep away from the pigs, which in Cincinnati roam freely in the streets. One of the women had hair the same reddish-gold color as Comfort’s, and all at once I felt tears stand in my eyes.

  “I fear that she’s dead,” I said.

  Thaddeus said in a kind voice, “Oh, my dear,” and I looked down at my lap. But when he took my fingers in his, I blinked back my tears and concentrated on easing my hand away. To my surprise, Thaddeus laughed and his manner shifted.

  “You don’t take much in the way of sympathy, do you?” he asked, and for once his voice sounded genuine. “Listen, they’re printing up a new broadsheet now. I’m guessing that with all the confusion Comfort didn’t think to give her name last night. I’ll just pop over to the newspaper office and see what I can find out. Here,” he said, fishing out the jam jar from his sling. “Sour cherry preserves.”

  He didn’t leave the spoon, but in any case I wasn’t hungry. I watched him stride down the street in his usual confident manner. When I first met him, Thaddeus seemed to me like an opportunistic man with most of his opportunities behind him. For all his long yellow hair he was aging: there were small wrinkles around his eyes and laugh lines at the corners of his mouth. But he was not unattractive, and if he worried about his own prospects, he never let on. He had a way of looking straight at a woman as though he could see her hidden self and he liked it. I’d seen him look this way at Comfort whenever he wanted something from her. A loan of money, usually.

  It felt a long time until he came back, but when he did he was carrying a folded newspaper in his good hand and he was grinning.

  “There,” he said, opening it up for me to see.

  On the page, three columns of names were printed in dark type: “Dead,” “Missing,” and “Saved.” Comfort’s name was just below Mrs. Flora Howard’s in the category of “Saved.” The print was very small but there was no mistake.

  Comfort Vertue. Of course she would save herself; why did I doubt that? As I held the long paper I noticed my fingers were shaking, and the page folded backward in the wind.

  “But where could she be?” I asked. I cast around in my mind for an explanation. “With Mrs. Howard?”

  “The woman boasted of having a large house.” Thaddeus grinned at me. In direct sunlight he looked even older. “Now’s our chance to see.”

  • • •

  Mrs. Flora Howard had not exaggerated about her home, which was an immense sand-colored stone house, three stories high, with a round turret on the left. The cabdriver—Thaddeus persuaded him to give us a free ride, since we were “victims of the Moselle, don’t you know”—let us out at the corner, and we walked up to the house between tightly clipped shrubbery, which flanked the drive like armrests. As we came to the front door I felt my heart give two hard beats against my ribs and then settle itself into a faster rhythm.

  Thaddeus rapped the large brass knocker. A moment later the blackest man I’d ever seen opened the door. He was immaculately dressed in a brown suit with a white shirt, and his eyes went straight to the hem of my skirt, which I knew was too short.

  “We’ve come to see Mrs. Howard,” Thaddeus said. He gave our names and explained that we were all on the Moselle together. “And Miss Comfort Ve
rtue, if she is here.”

  “Is she here?” I asked.

  The man kept his hand on the door. His suit coat was so crisp that it looked as though it had been cut from mahogany wood instead of cloth, and I wanted to tell him that my shawl, visibly mended, and my short dress were both borrowed.

  “May we come in?” Thaddeus asked.

  Still the man did not answer. He shut the door.

  The color rose slightly on Thaddeus’s face. “Well!” he said, drawing back his chin. The man’s silence had surprised me, too, but he hadn’t looked completely blank when we asked about Comfort, so that gave me hope.

  After a few moments the man opened the door again and stepped aside to let us into the hallway, which was very wide, almost a room by itself. A long wooden settee painted black stood against the wall to our left, and three framed pictures hung in a precise line above it. Mrs. Howard was coming down the hallway, wiping the back of her neck with a handkerchief.

  “I don’t know why you felt compelled to come in person when a note would have done just as well,” she said. She took my hand for a brief moment before letting it drop. She was wearing a dove-gray gown with long silver chains over it, one of them supporting a small bottle of perfume.

  “Mrs. Howard,” Thaddeus said. “I’m so happy to see you alive and well!”

  “Yes, yes, it’s been quite a remarkable few days, and I must return the compliments, of course, so happy to see you both, and so on. But I expect you’ve come to inquire about Comfort. I thought at least we’d have a day or two to recuperate first, but here you are already. Well, never mind that; I suppose it’s natural.” She frowned at me.

  “So Comfort is here? She’s well?” I asked.

  “Of course she’s here; isn’t that plain by what I am saying? She received a nasty blow to the head, but Dr. Penrod has seen her twice and declares she is in no danger. Well, these doctors are overly sanguine sometimes, but I daresay he’s right as long as she is adequately nursed, which I am more than capable of, considering how I nursed Mr. Howard in his last illness for over a year—and that was a bad case, let me assure you.” She paused to frown at me again.

  “A very bad case,” I said, for I thought she was waiting for my response, “considering how it ended in death.” Last illness, she’d said.

  Her face became very red, and I thought of my private nickname for her: Florid.

  “Well, Comfort is not so bad as that; no, indeed! And it was not my fault that Mr. Howard . . . No one could say I didn’t do everything possible. And I am quite just as careful with Comfort . . .”

  She went on talking without a break and without leading us out of the hallway. She put me in mind of a stout operatic singer I once knew, capable of talking over anyone and with terrible breath besides, but Mrs. Howard smelled of mint and violets. Her bottom two teeth grew in toward each other, and I found myself watching them while she spoke.

  “. . . and the oarsman swung around at the shout and hit Comfort with his oar. She nearly fell in the river again but for me. And then when I chastised the man, he had the effrontery to remind us he had just saved our lives!” She was telling us about her adventures, which I wanted to hear from Comfort.

  “I’d like to see her,” I said.

  But Mrs. Howard paid no attention; perhaps she did not even hear me. “Fortunately, Donaldson was waiting at the river with the carriage—he came as soon as he heard what had happened, which was quite soon, he’s remarkable that way—and we rushed home to where Dr. Penrod was waiting, thinking I might need some care. I pay for his boy’s schooling, you know; they’ve sent him back to England for that, better mathematics and science over there.”

  “You must let me see Comfort,” I said, and when Mrs. Howard continued talking, I said loudly, “Mrs. Howard, excuse me, I’ll just make my way upstairs.” That stopped her.

  “Oh, no! No, no!” She actually took a step sideways, blocking my passage. “You mustn’t disturb her, not now: I’ve only just gotten her to sleep!”

  “You talk as if my cousin were an infant.” I looked over at Thaddeus, who was wearing an amused smile. This annoyed me further.

  “She just needs rest and good nursing; she’ll be perfectly fine. Why won’t you take my word on that? I know what I am about. Anyway, she is asleep. Donaldson!”

  The black man appeared with a lacquered tea tray. He placed it neatly on the table next to the wooden settee and then turned one of the cup handles to match the direction of the other.

  Thaddeus bent to take a look. “Mm. Is that ginger cake?”

  “Don’t bother to ask him anything; he can’t speak,” Mrs. Howard said of Donaldson without so much as a glance at the man. “Now I must go. Dr. Penrod is waiting in the kitchen and I want to consult with him. After that, I’m gone to the apothecary. You may leave a note for Comfort if you wish. I hope tomorrow she’ll be able to sit upright . . . I’ll tell her you were here.” She turned to the kitchen and I realized she meant for us to take our tea in the hall.

  “She intends to keep Comfort to herself,” Thaddeus said in a low voice.

  “What do you mean?” But Thaddeus only smiled his annoying smile. “I’m her cousin,” I said, and he shrugged.

  Donaldson stood by the door with his hands at his sides. If he was surprised that we took up the offer of tea in the hallway, he didn’t show it; but I was hungry and thirsty, and Thaddeus never refused food. He cut himself two thick slices of ginger cake and sat down beside me, resting his plate on his knee.

  This was not the first time I had been shut out of some room Comfort was in. All too often she met with admirers after the last bow or the curtain call, then the flowers, a final adieu followed by the sweep of her dress as she made her way through the narrow passageways of some theater or another going back to her dressing room (not always the largest—she was not always the star). Perhaps I would be sent to find more wood for the dressing room stove, and when I returned the door would be shut and I would hear her laughing. “Don’t come in yet, May!” she would call, and I knew that someone else was in there, untying her laces. It was always chilly in theater hallways. It was not unusual for me to be locked out without a shawl and she would laugh, later, to find me with an old curtain over my shoulders. If the hall porter saw me, he might fetch off a boy to get me a half-pint of beer and some bread. One porter once gave me half of his dinner and let me have his stool while he stood. The clergy like to say that the theater is not a respectable profession, but I have found hall porters to be, to a man, honest, good folk.

  In Mrs. Howard’s hallway I drank my tea slowly and listened for any noise from upstairs. As I sliced a second piece of cake, Mrs. Howard called out to Donaldson from the kitchen.

  Donaldson glanced at us but did not move.

  “Donaldson!” she boomed again.

  For a moment I thought he was going to open the front door to usher us out, cake in hand, rather than leave us alone, but instead he walked back to the kitchen. How old was he? Forty? Fifty? Seventy? None of those ages would have surprised me. He had wide shoulders and a good build, and he was careful with his clothes, which I approved of. When the door closed behind him, I put my plate down on the settee and stood.

  Thaddeus looked up and winked, his mouth full. As I walked silently up the carpeted steps, I could hear Mrs. Howard’s loud voice at the back of the house. Upstairs I opened one door and then another until I found Comfort—not asleep in bed, as Mrs. Howard had claimed, but sitting on a white and blue upholstered chair looking out the front window. Her head was bandaged and she was wearing a loose white gown with a white pelisse over it, not tied and not properly ironed.

  She turned to look at me as I stepped into the room. “Why . . . May!”

  “Don’t stand up.” I went to her and took her two hands. After so many fittings and costume changes, I was as used to the feel of her skin as I was of my own.

  “May! Oh, May!” was all she could say at first, squeezing my fingers, and then, in spite of my words,
she stood up and pulled me into a hug. I felt her warmth for a moment before I drew back.

  “Did you think I had drowned?” I asked.

  “Of course not! No! Well, I don’t know! I was trying not to think,” she said, and that sounded right to me. “Flora was planning to get the afternoon paper—she’d been checking the names—but I’m not supposed to read any fine print for a day or two. Oh, May, I’m so glad to see you! My little May,” she said, although I am now taller than she is—something she always disputes.

  “You should rest. I’ll be back tomorrow. I just wanted to see if you were really all right.”

  “Of course I am.”

  Of course she was. Her hair smelled freshly washed, and the bandage on her forehead was as clean as if it were part of a costume.

  “I feel fine,” she said, “just the tiniest headache. Of course, I suppose I play it up some; you know how I am.”

  I looked her over carefully. Her face was paler than usual.

  “You should lie down,” I told her.

  “Oh, all right, but only if you’ll come with me, Frog. The bed is heavenly.”

  I helped her to the bed, and after she was settled I took off my shawl and carefully folded it up into a square, laid it on the end of the mattress, and stretched out next to her with my shoes on the shawl. I looked up at the ceiling. Comfort was right: the bed was very comfortable.

  “It’s pleasant here, don’t you think?” she asked. “A beautiful house. You must move your things in; there’s plenty of room. What an ordeal! Did you have a hard time?”

  “Mrs. Howard tried to keep me downstairs.”

  “I meant getting off the boat.”

  “Oh.” As usual I tried to be precise. “Not hard, exactly. Swimming to the bank took a long time. At least, it felt long.”

  “I can’t remember much, and I don’t want to,” Comfort said.

  I turned my head to breathe in the faint rose scent of the pillow. Relief, I sometimes think, is a feeling that doesn’t have any feeling: when it happens you hardly notice—you’ve already turned your mind to other things. Lying on the bed next to my cousin, I began thinking about money and how we could get ourselves to St. Louis. I could always sew or do alterations. Two tickets probably wouldn’t cost more than twelve dollars, and in New York or Pittsburgh, when Comfort wasn’t in a play, I could make that in a couple of weeks. Or we could tap Mrs. Howard, who was rich and clearly fond of Comfort. She might give us a loan. Thaddeus, of course, was a dead loss.