Power in the Blood
Page 76
“Nevis Dunnigan …”
“Yes! Yes! May I come in?”
“Nevis … Yes, you may.”
She stepped aside and let him pass into her life again.
“Do you work here?” he asked, looking around at the richly appointed hallway.
“I … no, this is my house.”
“Yours? But … how fortuitous, Lovey Doll! How wonderful you look!”
“We’ll sit in the parlor.”
She led him to a comfortable settee, her mind whirling. If Nevis Dunnigan breathed a word about her former identity, all her plans would be washed away in an instant. Leo Brannan would never marry a woman who had posed in the nude for a painter, and deceived him over her very name. Nevis’s reappearance in her life had come at the very worst moment she could conceive of. He looked awful, despite his new suit of cheap material and his overscented pomade, like a tramp made over by good works and a few dollars, yet still a tramp beneath it all. His nose was a large strawberry, his cheeks heavily veined by the unmistakable drinker’s web. She had not known him for long, back in Kansas City, but even if she had, his appearance had changed so very greatly over the years, she would never have recognized him without his own introduction.
“So, Nevis, how have things been with you?”
“Oh, excellent. You find me in the pink, as they say.”
“You are still a painter?”
“No, not anymore. They stole my work, the picture of you, and never compensated me with a single cent.”
“Compensated?”
“Imitations of my work became commonplace. Surely you knew your picture, or at least a copy of it, was in every saloon in the country.”
“No, I did not,” said Lovey Doll, appalled.
“And on cigar boxes too, and a host of other commercial canvases, so to speak. But you look utterly unchanged, Lovey Doll, from the days when I made that first immortal study.”
“Please, don’t call me by that name, I beg you. My real name is … Imogen Starr, and I have reverted to its use. Lovey Doll is so … theatrical, don’t you think?”
“I confess I always thought it suited you to perfection, but if you insist … Imogen.” He glanced around himself at the polished parquet flooring and ornate wallpaper. “So you are … Leo Brannan’s special friend?”
“I am.”
“I thought I had the right house, then when you appeared in the doorway I felt I must surely have made a mistake, but no, it was truly you, and you’re the very one I came to see, in your capacity as Mr. Brannan’s … confidante. Such an amazing coincidence. This is the work of invisible hands, to be sure. Are you a believer in fate, Lovey Doll … I mean, Imogen?”
“I scarce know what I believe anymore. What is it you want, Nevis?”
“Oh, yes, I had quite forgotten. Put simply, I have a business proposal for Mr. Brannan to … shall we say, endorse? He does not have to contribute money toward the venture, merely discuss it at length in his newspaper, and make sure other newspapers become interested.”
“Interested in what?”
Nevis told her, in considerable detail.
“You pickled the thing …?” asked Lovey Doll, aghast.
“He crouches inside a rain barrel even as we speak.”
“Nevis, this is foolishness.”
“Not at all. ‘The Sleeping Savage,’ we shall call him. He may be hundreds of years old, you know. His ghoulish appeal for the masses is strong. Why, P. T. Barnum has interested himself in lesser displays, and they certainly made money. It isn’t the kind of thing a lady of refinement such as yourself would care for, of course, but purely as a philanthropist, would Mr. Brannan care to assist us, do you think?”
“I shall ask him for you. In the meantime, I wish to contribute a small sum toward the construction of your glass case. Please wait here.”
Lovey Doll fetched fifty dollars from her bedroom and returned to Nevis. “Here, take it with my very best wishes for your plan.”
“Thank you indeed, Lovey … Imogen. And you’ll raise the subject with Mr. Brannan?”
“Of course I shall, but you must not come here again, Nevis, not ever. Mr. Brannan is a jealous fellow, and won’t allow any man to cross the threshold but himself. I shan’t mention to him that you actually came inside, since that would make him disinclined to include mention of your Indian in his newspaper. I shall tell him instead that I have heard of the thing, and recommend that he take notice of it. There must be no connection whatsoever between you and myself, do you understand?”
“Perfectly, and I thank you again. You are, as ever, an enchanting woman, and I have fallen under your spell once more. Your slightest wish is my stern command.”
“Very good, Nevis, and now I must hasten your departure, before Mr. Brannan arrives, you understand.”
“I am gone from your doorway already.”
He stood with her, and took hold of her hand. Before Lovey Doll could snatch it back, he had pressed it to his lips, then released it. “Ahh,” he breathed, “if only fate had conspired otherwise …”
“Indeed, and now you must go. Immediately, Nevis.”
She took his arm and began marching him toward the door. Nevis appeared close to tears as he stumbled alongside her.
“My feet are walking where they have seldom trod these many years since we parted—on the thinnest of air, my dear Lovey Doll, a dance of contentment at having chanced upon you again in this unlikely fashion.…”
“Yes, yes, a happy occasion for us both, Nevis.” She pushed him gently out into the night. “Now remember, don’t come here anymore, not even once, do you hear?”
“As you command, O queen.”
“Well, just remember it. Good night, Nevis.”
The door was closed in his face. Nevis stared at it in a daze for a moment, then turned and walked to the gate, and then along the street. He was in ecstasy. Lovey Doll Pines had come back into his life! He felt quite drunk, even if he hadn’t had a sip all day; it was the wine of remembrance and sentiment coursing through his veins, he supposed, and such sweet wine it was, lightly bubbling, intoxicating him with wispy yearnings that he had smothered years before. She really was the only woman for him in all the world, the female supreme, a queen incarnate. Beside Lovey Doll, Winnie was a drab harlot, coarsened by use. It disturbed him a little that Lovey Doll was a kept woman, but at least the man keeping her in such style was an important fellow, not some brute who would not appreciate her wonderful qualities. He understood now why Leo Brannan had sent his one-armed wife away; she could never have been compared to Lovey Doll, no matter how fine. And Lovey Doll had been most pleased to see him, he could tell. Even for people who had risen to inhabit the upper reaches of society, life could be a lonely place, Nevis was sure. She had needed to see a face from the past, just as he had, and the encounter had enlivened her features so prettily. Nevis himself felt handsome for the first time in a long while, and it did not stem from his new clothing and the two hours he had spent in the bathhouse. It was the inner man who glowed so brightly, aflame with the radiance of reawakened love.
His mood was ended abruptly by the sudden swooping onto his hat of a bird. The hat fell down, the bird screeched once like a soul in torment and was gone again, a long-tailed bird that even by the somber gleam of street gaslighting was a brilliant green. Nevis would have preferred a visitation from the bluebird of happiness, but was content to have been attacked by something green and unusual. He picked up his hat and continued homeward.
The news he brought to them this time was greeted by Smith and Winnie with subdued enthusiasm. Nevis thought their lack of outright joy was caused by fear of a new beginning for themselves; then again, they had not rediscovered the love of their lives, as he had done, so their awkward smiles were bound to suffer by comparison with his own.
“She really said she’d talk to him?”
“She gave her word as a woman of honor,” assured Nevis.
“What’s so honorable about bei
ng a rich man’s whore?” Winnie asked, and Nevis bridled.
“She is not a whore! How dare you! Lovey … Miss Starr is a decent woman who happens to have fallen in … in love with a man who happens to be married. And he isn’t even married anymore, it seems. I don’t wish to hear any further comments about the lady. Didn’t she give us fifty dollars? How dare you call her names … you, of all people!”
This remark caused Winnie’s mouth to open in surprise.
“Here now,” said Smith, “don’t you be calling no one names yourself.”
“I cannot stand a hypocrite,” Nevis announced, and walked stiffly outside. He was furious with Winnie, and thought of leaving his friends if they did not grant their benefactress the respect Nevis deemed appropriate. He went to the stable and stared for some time at the barrel containing their sleeping savage. It was an unremarkable tomb for so exotic a corpse, but thanks to Lovey Doll’s largess, it would be a temporary resting place. Nevis knew Smith would not spend hard cash on a glass case if the extra money and the promise of a word in Brannan’s ear had not come home with him. The project would succeed now because of the happy circumstances surrounding it. Nevis was so entranced by Lovey Doll he could not even resent her status as a wealthy man’s mistress. It was enough to know that she had prospered in the world, even as he had sunk to the gutter. It was fortunate for Nevis that they had met while he was well dressed and clean; it would have been mortifying had she recognized him while he rode the honey wagon. The reunion had worked out perfectly, considering the pitfalls that might have made it a nightmare. Nevis found it hard to concentrate on the barrel and its contents, so taken was his mind by visions of Lovey Doll Pines.
The remainder of the evening was strained. Nevis drank with his friends, but did not enjoy the liquor or their company, even when the talk was of their proposed investment in the savage. He chose to sleep on the floor rather than share the bed as usual, but could find no rest, so stirred was he by meeting again with the subject of Venus Revealed. He pretended to be asleep when Winnie rose from the bed and silently passed him by on her way to the door.
When Winnie was done in the outhouse, she paused in the yard. Her life in the last few days had been turned upside down. The finding of the Indian had been a harbinger of some kind, the prelude to a sequence of events that upset her a little more as each new thing revealed itself. Leo Brannan’s proposed ice factory and newfangled shitters for the whole town seemed calculated to lay her men low, and Nevis’s proposal for a sideshow with their savage had struck her as lunacy. Winnie had been obliged to change her mind when Nevis came home with cash and promises, but there had been something about his face and manner that made her suspicious. If she had not known better, Winnie would have sworn by her womanly instincts that Nevis was in love, and she knew it could not be with herself.
Winnie’s notion of love had undergone a transformation since her girlhood, a reduction of expectation from the severely limited to the nonexistent. From the time of her deflowering by an uncle, through the various mishandlings by boys and men until she decided to utilize their need for her body by joining Vanda Gentles’s brothel in Galveston, to her days at Gods of the Dance in Leadville, and on to her life with Smith, then with Smith and Nevis, Winnie had expected no love, and received none. Smith and Nevis both made her happy from time to time, but it was never love, nor could she reasonably demand it of them. A mutual warmth was the best any of them could provide for each other, and Winnie was able to content herself with that for most of the time.
The look on Nevis’s face that evening, though, had been remarkable. Winnie had seen it only once before, when one of Vanda’s girls had fallen in love with a customer, truly believing he loved her also. The customer had visited regularly, then never returned. The girl had killed herself. Nevis had that same look of sublime expectation, and Winnie was disturbed by it. His quick defense of Brannan’s whore had been remarkably vociferous, furthering Winnie’s suspicions, but then had come a sense of reality: why would a pathetic creature like Nevis imagine himself in love with a woman like Imogen Starr? Winnie had seen her once on the street, and she was indeed a beautiful woman; it was unthinkable that some kind of spark had passed between elegant Imogen and hapless favor-seeker Nevis. Winnie realized she would have been jealous, had such an unlikely thing occurred. But it had not. Nevis was merely excited over the prospect of a successful launching of the Sleeping Savage; there was no more to his exuberant mood than that.
Looking up, Winnie could see the lights of Elk House far above Glory Hole. Zoe Dugan, who once had danced with love-starved men in Leadville Taffy’s place, just as Winnie had, lived there, or had until recently. When Winnie first came to Glory Hole from Leadville, Elk House was already completed, the Brannans in occupancy. It had been some time before Winnie, attempting to change her life by working as a hotel maid, heard that Leo Brannan’s wife was called Zoe, and she had a daughter with a blue birthmark on her face. That could only have been Zoe Dugan and little Omie. Winnie had been consumed by envy for days. Such impossible good fortune as Zoe had found might have come Winnie’s way if only she had done as Zoe did, and left Gods of the Dance for legitimate work. Zoe’s new life was so utterly different from the one she had shared with Winnie that it was not possible to approach her; Winnie would have felt ashamed somehow. And so she stayed in the town below the mansion of her friend, and told no one of their former lives. Even when Zoe lost an arm, Winnie had been unable to muster the nerve to visit and offer her commiseration; it had been too long by then.
That was when Winnie began to drink in earnest. She drank herself out of work, and sold herself for more liquor, and drank even more to erase her shame over having fallen again into the life of a whore. Then Smith had introduced himself and offered her another kind of life. There would be no marriage, he told her, because men don’t marry whores that they know for sure are whores, but he would treat her well, he said, and never beat her if she would cook for him and occupy his bed to the exclusion of all others. Winnie had thought about it for several seconds, then agreed. It was not much of an offer, but it was the only one she had ever received. Smith had not lied; he was tender in his own clumsy fashion, and once she became used to the smell of him, she was not unhappy. Smith sometimes broke his own rules by bringing home friends with whom he wished to share Winnie, but these friends always passed out of their lives after a few weeks or months, and the basic pairing of herself and Smith was undisturbed. But then had come Nevis Dunnigan, a forlorn-looking fellow both of them had taken pity on, and the equation had been irrevocably altered. Now they were three, and Winnie wanted no part of Nevis to be yearning for some other woman, even one as unattainable as Leo Brannan’s fancy-dressed whore on Bowman Street.
Zoe was gone from the big house above the valley, sent away, it was rumored, because her husband could not bear to look upon her stump of an arm, or stand the presence of the blue-faced daughter who could make strange things happen; but most of all, he had found a comely woman with whom he was infatuated. Winnie knew this was the real reason for her old friend’s dismissal from paradise. She supposed there was a kind of justice to Zoe’s fall, since she had no right to such riches anyway, not being born to them. Winnie did not gloat over Zoe’s fate, or feel especially sorry for her, since she had, for a few years anyway, tasted the luxury of good food and fine clothing and a house big as a castle. No, Winnie could not weep for her, or bring herself even now to tell anyone of her own connection to the one-armed woman whose star had burned too brightly for too short a time. She did wonder where Zoe might have gone, but she did not wonder for very long, and returned to the warmth of her bed, where Smith lay gently rumbling, like a hibernating bear.
“Nevis,” she called softly, knowing he was only pretending to sleep over in the corner. “Nevis, you stop this nonsense and get into bed right now, before you catch a chill. Do you hear me, Nevis?”
He came quickly enough, and she warmed him with herself.
42
Mama had not explained their latest journeying, other than to say she could not live with Papa another minute, nor he with her, and Papa had a new lady to talk to now anyway, the lady in Glory Hole, whose house Papa had been going to all those times he had not come home.
“Will the lady come and live at our house now, Mama?”
“I expect she will, one way or another.”
“But she isn’t married to Papa; you are.”
“Not for very much longer. He has arranged for something called an annulment. That means the marriage between us will be … as if it never had been.”
“Just because of the other lady?”
“That and other things. Please, I don’t wish to discuss it further.”
Omie stared out the window beside her. They were on yet another train, this one taking them south to Durango. Zoe had said they would stay there for a time, while she thought about where they should go to spend the rest of their lives. Such an important decision could not be rushed. Omie hoped it would be somewhere with mountains as high as Colorado’s, but was not hopeful that this wish would be granted. It seemed likely that Mama would want to go as far from the scene of her disgrace as money could take them. Omie wondered if a flat desert was to be their final destination, or the grasslands of Nebraska. They might go back to New York City, which would be a very good choice, in Omie’s opinion; she remembered with delight all the electric brilliance of that place, and the wonderfully bloody play they had seen about the awful Indian brothers who killed and killed until they were themselves killed. Mama had said the play was trash, but Omie liked it very much.