by Rebecca Dean
“How-de-do, Wallis,” he said genially, a kindly smile splitting his face as he held his hand out to her. “I’m right glad to meet you.”
Wallis stared at him in horror. Not only didn’t he look to be a gentleman, he didn’t sound like a gentleman either.
She became aware of her mother watching her with anxious eyes. “Where are your manners, Wallis?” she prompted. “Shake Mr. Rasin’s hand.”
Wallis did so.
Mr. Rasin beamed down at her and, withdrawing his other hand from behind his back, produced a prettily beribboned box of sugared almonds. “For you, Wallis,” he said, giving them to her.
She accepted them, not wanting to, but not seeing what else she could do.
“There now, isn’t that swell?” Alice said happily. “Aren’t we just a nice little family?”
As far as Wallis was concerned, Mr. Rasin wasn’t family, and she had no intention of treating him as if he were. To her vast relief, she found out her Aunt Bessie felt just the same.
“Of all the men to fall in love with, Alice,” she said in exasperation and in front of Wallis, “John Freeman Rasin has to be not only the most unlikely, but the most unsuitable.”
Alice narrowed azure blue eyes and put a hand on her hip. “And just why is Free so unsuitable, Bessie?”
“Because he’s an ‘out’—and with good reason, too.”
To be “out” was a Baltimore expression meaning that someone wasn’t, where Baltimore high society was concerned, “in.” In high-society-conscious Baltimore, there wasn’t a worse thing to be.
“Fiddle-dee-dee!” Wallis had never seen her easygoing mother so angry. She was even angrier than she had been when her quarrel with Aunt Bessie had resulted in their moving out of her house and moving into the Preston Apartment House. “John Freeman Rasin was educated at Loyola College, and his daddy has controlled state politics in Maryland for more than thirty years.”
“Carroll Rasin may well be head of the Baltimore Democratic Party,” Bessie shot back waspishly, “and he may well be wealthy, but he hasn’t any pedigree. None of the Rasins have.”
“Just because Free didn’t come to America with the Pilgrim Fathers doesn’t mean he isn’t kind and good company and generous!” As always, Alice couldn’t sustain her temper and was now on the verge of tears. “I’ve been a widow for eleven years, Bessie. I don’t want to be a widow all my life.”
Her elder sister regarded her with loving despair. “But Free isn’t the kind of man women marry, Alice. He wouldn’t still be a bachelor at forty if he were. Not only doesn’t he hold any socially eminent position, he doesn’t even work—or hasn’t for as long as I have known him.”
“Free doesn’t need to work.” Alice dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “His daddy gives him all the money he needs.”
“There you go!” Bessie threw up her hands and her eyes to heaven. “What kind of a husband would a man like that be? Lord Almighty, Alice dear. Open your eyes before it’s too late.”
For days after the scene between her mother and her aunt had taken place, Wallis was so quiet and withdrawn that even Pamela grew exasperated with her. Wallis didn’t care. All she could think of was that word husband. What if her mother married Free Rasin? What would happen to her then? Her Uncle Sol would turn them out of the house on Biddle Street and, as Free Rasin didn’t work, there was no telling what sort of a home they would then live in. As far as Baltimore high society was concerned, she and her mother would be social outcasts.
As she walked down Preston Street on her way to visit her grandmother, she was seized by fear of what the future held. How could she ever become a debutante if, because her mother had married Free Rasin, she was regarded as being an “out”? And if she didn’t become a debutante, how would she ever meet eligible young men? The answer was, she wouldn’t be able to.
As a highly suitable marriage was the only acceptable career for a well-brought-up girl, what kind of a future was she then going to be facing?
She was a block away from her grandmother’s when she saw Mabel Morgan walking up the other side of the street. She wasn’t alone, or with Violet Dix, but with a group of girls Wallis didn’t know; girls who were, she assumed, Mabel’s classmates at Bryn Mawr.
She averted her gaze, intending to ignore them.
Mabel didn’t give her the opportunity.
“Hi, Bessiewallis!” she called out with nothing friendly in her tone. “How ya doin’? Is your Uncle Sol still ponying up for your school fees?”
The girls with Mabel looked across at her with prurient interest. Some of them began sniggering.
Wallis clamped her mouth tightly shut and clenched her fists. To engage in a shouting match across the street would be to lower herself to Mabel’s level, and she wasn’t going to do that; not when she was so near to number 34 and when word of a fracas might get back to her grandmother.
Seething with rage and frustration, she walked on, behaving as if Mabel and her friends didn’t exist. It took all of her very considerable self-control, but as the sound of the sniggering faded into the distance she knew one thing for certain. One day she was going to be someone very, very special. Just how she would attain that goal she didn’t know, but she knew that when that glorious day came, the snobs of Baltimore high society would bitterly regret the way they had so contemptuously treated her and her mother. As for the likes of Mabel Morgan and her friends—when she was Someone with a capital S, they could go down on their knees begging and she wouldn’t even give them the time of day.
“Instead of spending the spring vacation at Pot Springs, how would you like to spend them with your Montague cousins in Virginia?” her mother asked her when, after spending time with her grandmother, she finally arrived home. “It will make a nice change, and you know Cousin Lelia just loves to have you stay at Wakefield.”
“And I just love being there.” It was true. Cousin Henry apart, she far preferred spending time with the Montague side of her family than with the Warfield side, for the Montagues were far more relaxed and easygoing.
Like Pot Springs, Wakefield Manor was a typical rambling Southern plantation house, with glistening white columns and long verandahs and balconies. It was set in the midst of vast grassy lawns studded with giant cedars and was somewhere the Montague clan tended to gather two or three times a year.
Her Aunt Lelia was her mother’s first cousin and so, strictly speaking, not her aunt at all. Cousin and aunt were words used loosely among Montagues. Whether first or second cousins, or first cousin or second cousin once removed, they always referred to each other simply as “cousin,” or, if there was a large age difference, as “aunt” and “uncle.” When it came to her Montague cousins, Wallis had a lot of them.
Her favorite was her cousin Corinne, for twenty-one-year-old Corinne was glamour personified. She was a typical Montague in looks, being blond and blue-eyed, and she had only recently married a dashing Navy pilot, Henry Croskey Mustin. Flying was still such a novelty that a pilot of any kind was a figure of awe, and a naval pilot more so than most.
During her few weeks at Wakefield Manor, Wallis formed a firm ambition. When she was older, she wanted to be just like her cousin Corinne. She wanted to be thought enviably glamorous—and she wanted to be married to a Navy pilot as handsome, dashing, and fearless as Henry Croskey Mustin.
She begged a photograph of Henry from Corinne and added it to her pinup collection.
Pamela capped it by producing a photograph of Prince Edward that had been taken by her stepfather on his summer visit to Sandringham. Unlike earlier newspaper photographs of him, Prince Edward no longer looked quite so nondescript. He had obviously just finished a game of tennis because he was wearing white flannels and had a racket in one hand. With his other hand he was pushing a lock of pale gold hair away from his forehead, and he was smiling toward the camera with an engagingly quizzical expression in his eyes.
Arriving home from summer vacation wasn’t as happy an experience for Wa
llis as it usually was, for it was quite obvious that, in her absence, Mr. Rasin had been spending a lot of time at 212 Biddle Street.
Some of his clothes now hung in the chifforobe in the guest bedroom. Worse, she came across a pair of his shoes in her mother’s bedroom.
Nearly every night of the week, he was a guest for dinner. Large, moonfaced, and always amiable, he seemed to fill whatever room—dining room or parlor—he happened to be in.
“And he always brings me a gift,” Wallis said gloomily to Aunt Bessie. “I don’t want him to. I just don’t want him to be there. I hardly ever have any time with my mother on my own any more. Sometimes he even stays the night.”
Bessie, who had been knitting, dropped her needles into her lap so abruptly she lost half a dozen stitches. “Are you quite sure about that, Wallis?”
It was only when she looked into her aunt’s appalled face that Wallis realized she shouldn’t have told anyone—not even Bessie—about Mr. Rasin’s sleeping arrangements.
“He sleeps in the guest bedroom,” she said hurriedly, closing her mind to the thought of the shoes she had seen in her mother’s bedroom, “I only mind it because he doesn’t shave before coming down for breakfast.”
It was information her aunt didn’t look much comforted by.
When Wallis arrived home there was, for once, no sign of Mr. Rasin.
A smell of frying chicken drifted from the kitchen, and there was a plate of freshly baked oatcakes on the dining table.
“It’s nice to be on our own, Mama,” she said, giving her mother a loving hug. “Aunt Bessie is fine. She’s thinking of taking a trip to Monterey County.”
“That’s swell.” Alice gave her a kiss. “And you’re right, Wallis. It is nice to be on our own together, but there are many times when you are not here, and then I get a little lonesome.”
She sat down at the table.
Wallis, her antenna for disaster utterly failing her, sat down at the other side of the table and reached for an oatcake.
Alice hesitated, cleared her throat, and clasped her hands in her lap. “Because of the lonesome thing, I’ve something very important to tell you, sweetheart.”
Wallis was so happy at having her mother once again to herself for a little while that she still didn’t sense what was about to come.
“I’m going to marry Mr. Rasin, Wallis.”
Wallis had just bitten into the oatcake.
She choked on it.
“Now, there’s no reason for you be upset, Wallis darling.” Alice reached across the table, taking Wallis’s hands in hers.
Wallis snatched them back, pushing her chair away from the table, struggling to her feet.
“Of course there is!” Hot tears scalded her eyes. “I don’t want you to marry him! I don’t want you to marry anyone!”
Alice sprang to her feet, rounded the table, and tried to take Wallis in her arms. Wallis pushed her violently away.
“I don’t want to share this little house with anyone else but you, Mama!” The tears poured down her face. “Uncle Sol didn’t buy it for us so that someone else could come and live here! It has always been just the two of us, and if you marry Mr. Rasin it will never be just the two of us again! Not ever!”
“But Wallis darlin’, in a family, three is better than two and Free is so kind and he’s so lookin’ forward to being your stepdaddy …”
Alice tried to put her arms around her once again.
Wallis struggled free. “No!” she shouted, backing away until the closed dining room door prevented her from backing any farther. “No, Mama! No!”
Alice was now crying almost as hard as Wallis was. “You’re not being fair to me, Wallis.” Tears dripped onto her hands. “You’re too young to understand. You haven’t even understood about the house. Your Uncle Sol didn’t buy it for us. Free did.”
It was a reality too much for Wallis. With a howl of anguish she spun around, wrenched the door open, and raced up the stairs to her third-floor bedroom. Once there, she turned the key in the lock, threw herself on the bed, and, ignoring Alice’s pleas to be let into the room, pummeled her pillows in a fury of anguish until she collapsed on top of them, exhausted and still crying.
To her stunned surprise she received sympathy from no one. Pamela thought she was making a huge fuss about nothing. “So what if Mr. Rasin did buy the house on Biddle Street? You like it, don’t you?” she’d said with her usual down-to-earth practicality on the day Wallis was twelve. “And if your mother has Mr. Rasin for company, you won’t have to feel guilty about leaving her on her own when you’re a debutante and out at parties and dances every night.”
It was a line of thought shared by Aunt Bessie. “In five years’ time you’ll be seventeen and a young woman, Wallis,” she’d said, speaking to her more sternly than Wallis could ever remember her doing. “Life will be much easier for you then if you don’t have to worry about your mother being on her own.”
“But I thought you didn’t like Mr. Rasin!” Wallis simply couldn’t understand the attitudes she was meeting with. “You told Mama he wasn’t good enough for her!”
Bessie flinched, well aware that in the heat of the moment she’d said things in front of Wallis that she shouldn’t have said. “Your mother could certainly have married someone far more socially eminent and more personable than Free, but it is Free she loves, Wallis. That your mother is marrying a man who is kindness itself is something to be very grateful for. And you should be proud of her for choosing to marry for love, rather than marrying for social advancement. Which, let me tell you, she could have done if she’d so wished.”
Wallis knew her aunt was referring to her Uncle Sol. Even though the idea of her mother marrying her uncle was even more horrific than the idea of her marrying Free Rasin, it wasn’t a comparison that helped her come to terms with the thought of having Free Rasin as a stepfather.
To her stunned incredulity, even her grandmother failed her as an ally.
“Your mother has been on the road to ruin for years,” she’d said bluntly. “It’s better she marry Carroll Rasin’s son than continue living the way she has been doing. Free’s a no-good lay-about, but at least he’s doing the honorable thing and putting a wedding ring on her finger. It’s more than any of her other beaux were willing to do.”
That her grandmother was raising no objections to the marriage was something she found almost impossible to believe until Pamela said sagely, “Well, of course she isn’t going to do so, Wally. It means now she doesn’t have to worry that your mother may one day say yes to your Uncle Sol. The last thing your grandmother wants is to be your mother’s mother-in-law for a second time.”
Once she knew she had no allies who would help her prevent the marriage, she used emotional blackmail.
“I’m not coming to the wedding, Mama. I’ll run away rather than go to it.”
Alice, who had never previously had a moment’s trouble with Wallis, was in despair. “But darlin’, of all the wedding guests, you are the most important. How can I get married without you there? It would break my heart.”
Distraught at the thought of a wedding without her daughter present, Alice asked Bessie and her cousin Lelia if they would talk to Wallis and make her understand what a terrible thing her not being there would be.
“You see, honey,” her Aunt Lelia said, an arm affectionately around Wallis’s shoulders, “your mama loves Mr. Rasin, and her wedding to him should be a joyous occasion. If you aren’t there, that won’t be the case. You will make your mother very unhappy. So unhappy she may never get over it.”
“If you come to the wedding,” Bessie said, having run out of all other persuasions, “you will be the first to cut the cake. Being first, you’ll probably find the good-luck token ring and silver thimble and bright new dime that are hidden in it.”
Wallis wasn’t remotely interested in the ring and the thimble and the dime.
As the day of the wedding approached, she was, however, realistic enough to know that
however much she didn’t want to be there, there wasn’t really any other option. She couldn’t very well run away, when she had nowhere to run to.
The wedding was to take place in the parlor at Biddle Street. Both Warfields and Montagues had accepted invitations to attend it. The dress her mother was to wear remained a closely guarded secret. The dress Alice had set aside for Wallis to wear was of embroidered batiste laced with blue ribbons.
It was the prettiest dress Wallis had ever seen, but it didn’t win her over.
“I don’t want to be there,” she said mulishly to Pamela, “and I’m not going to behave as if I want to be there.”
When the big day came, the sight of so many of her relations, all in their very best finery, almost weakened her resolve. Almost, but not quite.
Her mother wore a gown the same color as the ribbons threaded in Wallis’s dress and, in her upswept hair, a white gardenia. Her grandmother wore black, as always, but instead of bombazine her gown was made of shiny silk. Her Uncle Sol wore a suit of pale cream linen, chamois gloves, and a thunderous frown. The bridegroom, despite his suit being carefully and expensively tailored, looked as if he were wearing something that belonged to someone else. He did, however, sport a red rose in his buttonhole—and he wore a very big, very happy smile.
Wallis didn’t. Her emotions were in such tumult that she felt violently ill.
With a face set and mutinous, she stood a little behind her mother as her mother and Free Rasin began to take their vows. With every second that the service continued, her inner tumult increased. In the end she could stand it no longer. Uncaring that she was behaving badly, she began edging away. Though she could be seen doing so, no one disturbed the solemnity of the vow-taking in order to bring her back.
As her mother said, “I will,” Wallis reached the door and left the room.
Across the hallway, the dining room door was open. A white naperied table was laid, all ready for the reception. In the center of it, in wonderful splendor, stood the many-tiered wedding cake.