Siri Mitchell

by Unrivaled

“Now, then. The first thing to do is to get City Confectionery candy out of the city’s stores.”

  I decided to do a little scouting. That’s what I’d done back in Chicago when business was slow and I needed to drum up customers; I’d called on the competition. I asked Nelson to take me to City Confectionery.

  “Been a long time since I had some Fancy Crunch,” Nelson noted.

  “What’s that?”

  “Fancy Crunch? Well . . . it’s nuts, covered with a fancy coating. Pink, green, yellow. That coating crunches when you bite into it, and then those nuts crunch some more.”

  “So they’re good?”

  “They’re fine.”

  Fine? Fine never sold anything to anyone. At least not for any length of time.

  “Real fine. But they’re fancy.”

  I asked Nelson to stop at the end of the block. Pulling my tie from my collar, I shrugged my coat off and then left them both on the back seat. I walked past the building, rolling up my sleeves as I went, and then turned the corner into an alley.

  There was a wide door at the back of the building with boxes stacked in front of it. I picked up a box, then put a shoulder to the door and pushed. It swung open, sending out a puff of warm, sugar-scented air as I stepped into a large kitchen. Everything was white: the floors, the walls, the clothes and caps the workers wore. The only color came from the nuts that were being thrown around in large metal pans. The clatter was loud, but it was hardly on the scale of the Standard factory. And in spite of the din, the employees carried on conversations, laughing and talking as they worked.

  If my father’s factory was hell, this was clearly some kind of paradise.

  “Where should I put this?”

  One of the men put down his pan and stepped toward me. “What is it?”

  I tried to hold the box away so I could read the label, but I couldn’t catch a glimpse of it. I tried to shrug. “Got me.”

  The man took it from me and walked from the room.

  I followed him. “So what are you making? Some kind of candy?”

  He smiled. “If you want a package of Fancy Crunch, just go on up front and ask.”

  “They’ll give me one?”

  “Sure. Help yourself. We all do.”

  “All of you?” There had been at least a dozen people back there in the kitchen.

  He shrugged. “Sure. We take what we want.”

  They did? Gillespie never let the workers take any Royal Taffy from the factory, although I’m sure some got smuggled out in coat pockets now and then. “They don’t worry about the money that’s lost?”

  “If a man’s gotta eat, might as well eat Fancy Crunch. That’s what Mr. Kendall says.”

  I could see why they weren’t doing well. “Nice guy, that Mr. Kendall?”

  “He’s the best!”

  “Been working here long?”

  “Five years now. But that’s nothing. Most everybody else has been here longer than me. Could you hold on to this for a minute?” He held out the box toward me.

  I took it while he cleared a place on a shelf in a closet. “There’s a lot more boxes where this one came from.”

  “I’ll find somewhere for them to go.” He was looking around the shelves as he said it, and I’m sure he came to the same conclusion I did. He’d have to go find a different closet. Because it looked like he needed a hand, I brought in the rest of the boxes and then helped him pile them in a hallway. By the time I left, I’d found out everything I needed to know about City Confectionery.

  After listening in on the meeting and after having visited City Confectionery, I went back to my father’s house feeling more dirtied and more shamed than I had ever felt back when I’d worked for Manny. Mr. Kendall may not have a head for business, but his employees clearly loved him. There was something ruthless and much too bloodless about plotting to destroy a man’s business. It felt more honest somehow to beat him up in an alley or break his legs. At least then he could see what was coming and have a chance to defend himself.

  Augusta was waiting to go somewhere when Nelson dropped me off, so I decided to do some exploring. To think that we’d had to huddle together in a shack up in Chicago while he’d been living it up down here in one of the biggest houses in the city!

  The entry hall downstairs was carpeted with all kinds of red rugs laid end to end. The paneled wooden walls and staircase smelled of the polish the maids were always rubbing into it. The dining room walls were paneled in white with a gold design painted around the top edges.

  Out to the back of the house was a room I’d never even seen before. It was topped with a dome of stained glass. I guessed the room to be Augusta’s, since it was decorated like a jungle with trees and flowers and a parrot that squawked as I stepped out onto the tiled floor. My father had an office on the main floor that looked like a library, and Augusta had what she called a sitting room. There was also a parlor done up with furniture that made what Dreffs had called my “posterior” hurt to even look at.

  Up above, on one side of the second floor, were six bedrooms, mine among them. There was a ballroom on the other side with a shiny patterned wood floor and a row of chandeliers hanging down its center. The house was bigger than the whole block where I’d lived on the South Side. And I still hadn’t finished exploring.

  The Queen of Love and Beauty must have lived in a house like this one her whole life. And I bet she was surrounded by men who’d done the same. She probably hadn’t given me a second thought after she’d disappeared into the crowd that night.

  So I shouldn’t think about her either. Shouldn’t keep thinking about her. Why couldn’t I stop thinking about her?

  Because she’d looked at me.

  Usually girls like her looked right through me. And if they bothered to see me at all, they backed away in fear. As if I might pick their purses . . . which I rarely ever did, and never had I taken something from someone who didn’t deserve it. A girl like her had never thrown herself into my arms before as if she trusted me to help her, to take care of her. Not like that girl had.

  I shook my head to clear my thoughts, telling myself to stop thinking and start looking. There now—there was a door set into the wall at the back of the second-floor hall that I’d never noticed before. Another closet? I opened it.

  Another set of stairs.

  But it didn’t have a carved banister like the others, and it hadn’t been polished to a shine. At the top I had to bend forward to keep my head from bumping against the low ceiling of the third floor. It was darker up here, the windows much smaller.

  I looked into the first room. The walls were white-washed and so was the furniture. Just a narrow iron-framed bed and a small wooden table with a white basin and pitcher on top of it. The second bedroom was like it. And so was the third. When I looked into the fourth, though, I got a surprise.

  “Mr. Clarke!” Jennie had been sitting on a bed, twisting something between her hands. She leapt to her feet when she saw me. The other rooms had been what my mother had always called “serviceable,” but this one was filled with color. The bed covers had been embroidered. There was a garland of red and white, green and yellow draped around the window, and there was a tin can filled with what looked like flowers on her small bedside table. In fact, Jennie, in her black-and-white uniform, was the only plain thing in that room.

  “What are you doing?”

  She’d shoved whatever she’d been working on into her apron’s pocket. “I just came up to change out my shoelace. I only meant to be gone for a minute.”

  “What was it you were making?”

  She put a hand into her pocket and then, with a sigh, brought it out. “Just a bit of foolishness.” She held it out to me.

  It was a Royal Taffy candy wrapper that she’d folded and wrapped into the shape of a flower.

  “That’s nifty.” I looked around the room. “Is this how you made that?” I nodded toward the garland.

  “Oh—not that. That’s much easier. You just take t
he wrappers and twist them a little at the edges . . .” Jennie smoothed out her flower and demonstrated. “Like that. The red is Royal Taffy. The green is Fancy Crunch.”

  “That’s not going to be around for very much longer.”

  I hadn’t realized I’d said the words out loud until her eyebrows had risen in alarm. “Why not?”

  “I, uh . . . just heard . . . they’re going out of business.”

  As she pushed to standing, the wrapper fell from her lap. “Out of business!”

  “But—not just yet.” I shouldn’t have said anything. To make her forget my words, I pointed at the garland. “What others do you use?”

  “Others?”

  “Wrappers. For the different colors.”

  Her brow hadn’t cleared, but at least she wasn’t staring at me anymore in that awful, wounded way. “Switzers and Tootsie Roll wrappers, all joined together with a length of thread.”

  It was something my baby sister might have done. She’d always seemed to find a way to use whatever scraps of this and that someone had left lying around.

  “You won’t tell, will you? About my being here? All the others think it’s a waste of time.”

  I spied a wooden figure of a little bird. He was a colorful fellow, propped up against the tin can. It looked like . . . was it a whistle?

  “I never do it when I’m supposed to be working. Except . . . well . . . for now. But I was about to go back downstairs.”

  Her words drew my attention back to her. “Why would I tell?”

  She sent a timid look up at me.

  It caused me to remember something I’d forgotten. I wasn’t Charlie anymore. I was Charles. “Er . . . no. Of course not. Sorry. Just didn’t know . . .” I backed toward the door. “Sorry. I don’t belong here.”

  Truth was, I didn’t really belong anywhere.

  15

  “Lucy?” My mother walked right past the parlor and continued on toward the kitchen. “Lucy!” The house had been a noisy place this morning, with visitors keeping the maid busy opening and closing the front door.

  I placed my book on the divan and went to the front hall. I hadn’t really been reading anyway. I’d been daydreaming about him. That man from the ball with his delicious chocolate-colored eyes. “Mother?”

  She whirled around, hand at her heart. “My stars, but you gave me a fright! That messenger was a man from the mayor’s office. They need you over at the air meet right away.”

  “But . . . I was just there.” I’d opened the air meet for the city just three days before.

  “I know it, but—” She threw her hands up in the air. “They’ve an automobile waiting for you outside. You need to change. Now.”

  With the maid’s help, I put on my new canard blue crepe de Chine dress with the hobbled skirt that my aunt had insisted on buying for me in Paris. Its scooped neck had fasteners in the Russian style on both the bodice and the drapery of the skirt. I’d seen hobbled skirts on some of the women in the city, but none of theirs could rival mine. I could hardly walk, it was draped so tightly. Fingering the satin Queen of Love and Beauty sash that I’d slipped on over my dress, I debated whether to coil up my hair and secure it in psyche puffs at the back, but I decided there wasn’t time. Instead, I gathered it up and wound it into a pompadour, sticking a few pins into it and jamming my hat down on top. There! Now no one would ever know what my hair looked like underneath.

  Mother was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, but she was still in her green percale housedress.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “The doctor said he would stop by. I thought I should stay.”

  “Then—”

  I heard the screen door slap shut and the tread of heavy footsteps. “Where’s Lucy?” Sam’s voice.

  “I have no idea,” answered Mrs. Hughes.

  Mother was wringing her hands. “I sent the coachman down to the confectionery and asked him to bring back Samuel Blakely to escort you.”

  I felt my brow lift.

  Her mouth folded. “There was no time to ask anyone else.”

  The service door swung open and Sam appeared a moment later. He’d slicked his hair back and was wearing a tweed suit coat over a white shirt and necktie. I couldn’t help but smile. If my life this year was going to be one long string of events, at least I had a friend by my side.

  “Hello, Mrs. Kendall.”

  Mother nodded before passing by me on her way to the stairs. As she put a hand to the banister, she paused. “There will be newspaper reporters there. I don’t have to tell you . . .”

  She didn’t. I knew all of her hopes depended upon me. And now, since my candy had failed, I was ready to accept that responsibility. If marrying well would save our family, then that’s what I was going to do. Unless it required encouraging the attention of Walter Minard. In that case, I was prepared to fail.

  Sam helped me into the carriage, then took the seat opposite me.

  “You look very nice today, Sam.”

  A flush rode his cheeks, and he pulled at his tie. “Thought I ought to wear this. You being the queen and all.”

  It suited him. As he sat there, idly thwacking his thumb against his knee, I considered Sam as I might have done a suitor. He’d become handsome while I’d been away. He’d grown into his nose, and maturity had filled out the lean hollows in his cheeks. Imagine that! Sam Blakely. A girl could do worse. A vision of horsey yellow teeth passed through my thoughts. A girl could do much worse, indeed.

  Which reminded me.

  I pulled his handkerchief from my handbag and gave it to him.

  He snatched it from me, with Fancy Crunch-colored fingertips. Seeing my look, he held them up. “We were panning nuts today. Pink candy coating . . .” He held the other hand up. “And green.” Folding the handkerchief, he tucked it into his suit pocket.

  “Someone went to an awful lot of trouble to embroider that for you.”

  He gave me a keen glance before looking away.

  “She did very nice work.” Better than I could have done.

  He said nothing.

  “What does the ‘H’ stand for?”

  “Howell.”

  Samuel Howell Blakely. “Are you sweet on someone, Sam?”

  “No!” A deep flush appeared at his collar and washed up toward his ears.

  “Is it anyone I know?”

  He refused to answer. But Sam was sweet on someone. I knew he was. It was the only explanation for his odd behavior. And the embroidery. Who could it possibly be? And was he . . . was he courting her? I couldn’t imagine Sam married. He was hardly . . . well . . . I supposed he was twenty now. That was a marrying age. If I could marry, then he certainly could.

  As I thought about the sons of St. Louis, my stomach began to sour. I knew them all; I’d grown up with them. We’d taken dancing lessons together at Mr. Mahler’s. And attended fortnightly dances together as well. But while I’d been in Europe, they’d been . . . here.

  I wanted someone different, someone . . . new. Someone like that man at the ball. Who was he? And which family did he belong to?

  Sam leaned into the cushion and stretched an arm along the back of the seat. “Did you ever see one of those flying machines, Lucy? While you were over there in Europe?”

  Flying machines? “No.” And I hadn’t been able to stay for the first day of the air meet, earlier in the week, either. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that a man could fly.

  When we got to the airfield the machines were lined up, one behind the other, like a row of overgrown mosquitoes. How on earth did they mount up into the sky? People said they soared through the air as if they were birds, but I remained a skeptic. I’d always held a secret affection for Doubting Thomas. Why should he have believed an impossible thing just because others said it was true? What was wrong with having to see in order to believe?

  “Miss Kendall?” The mayor’s secretary approached us, wiping at the sweat that had formed on his brow. “If you’l
l follow me.” He gestured toward the grandstand. “We’ve had word the president might be on his way.”

  President?

  Sam sent me a quizzical look.

  I shook my head, not wanting to seem ill-informed. I’d ask the secretary later, in private.

  The secretary escorted me to the stage, then held my hand as I sidestepped my way up onto it. On a table that had been set up by the podium, a large medallion had been displayed next to a bouquet of red roses. “These were meant for the winner of today’s race, but if the president decides to come, you’ll hand him the flowers and then the medallion. After that, I’ll step forward and ask if he’d like to address the crowd.”

  Sam poked me in the side.

  “Ouch!” I muttered it under my breath.

  “Ask him!” He mouthed the words.

  “You said the president? The president of what?”

  “President Roosevelt. He’s here for the Republican Party’s election campaign.”

  Beside me, Sam’s jaw dropped open. “President—!” His eyes looked like they might pop from his head.

  “He’s—but—he’s coming here?” Suddenly I found it awfully difficult to speak. My heart had doubled its beat. President Roosevelt! No one had warned me that there would be a president here. I might have . . . I might have . . . done a dozen things differently if I’d known! I couldn’t have worn anything better than I was wearing. But I might have taken the time to properly pin up my hair. And actually wash behind my ears that morning. To meet the former president! Everyone knew he was much better than the current one. “I don’t know if I—I don’t—”

  “We’re not certain he’ll come, mind you, but if he does, at least we’ll be prepared.” The secretary showed us to a seat at the front and center of the stage before bringing the president of the Chamber of Commerce over. “Mr. Foster will introduce you. The mayor’s with President Roosevelt at the moment.”

  “But—but how do I know if he’s coming? And what do I say?” No one had warned me. A simple “Welcome to St. Louis” speech couldn’t be very difficult. But what did one say to a president?