YASHMEEN, LORELEI, NOELLYN, AND FAUN, down for a day’s truancy in London with the Snazzbury fittings for an excuse, had been summoned to an atelier located in a dismal industrial building, closer perhaps to Charing Cross Road than to Regent Street, around a corner forever in the shadows of taller structures surrounding it. The sign, in modern lettering recalling the entrances to the Paris Métro, read L’ARIMEAUX ET QUEURLIS, TAILLEURS POUR DAMES.
“Here are the basic models. . . . Mademoiselles? If you please.” Down a kind of helical ramp—the exact geometry was difficult to read in the artful framework of shadow it seemed to be part of—came gliding a line of young women in black, so silently that even their careful breathing might be heard, hatless, unrouged, hair swept up tightly and pinned so close to the head that they could be ambiguous boys, eyes enormous and enigmatic, lips set in what our University misses recognized as cruel smiles not without their element of the erotic.
“I say,” murmured Lorelei, shivering a little, “I rather fancy that one.”
“The costume or the girl?” inquired Noellyn.
“Can’t say much for any of them,” sniffed Faun.
“Oh Faun you are such a judgmental person. And that one, there coming along just behind, has been casting you ever such incendiary glances, hadn’t you noticed?”
Yes and later in the fitting rooms—it turned out these haughty mannequins were employed also as fitters for the establishment. Yashmeen, Faun, Noellyn, and Lorelei, in their stays and stockings and underlinen, found themselves at the mercy of the Silent-Frocked corps, who crept up on them with measuring tapes and strange oversize calipers and commenced without preamble to take the most intimate sorts of measurements. Protests were useless. “Excuse me, I say I do know my measurements, and my hips are certainly not as enormous as what you’re writing down there, even if it is in centimeters. . . .” “Oh please, why is it necessary to measure along the insides of my limbs, when surely the outsides would do as well . . . and, and now you’re tickling, well not tickling perhaps but . . . hmm . . .” But their tormen-trices carried on in determined silence, exchanging significant looks with one another and now and then finding eye-contact with the girls, which often provoked blushes and discomfiture, though it might be difficult for an accidental observer—or say a clandestine one—to judge the level of innocence in the room.
It seemed to Yashmeen that the secret of the Snazzbury frock lay in the lining, the precise, as one would say, microscopic fine-structure of the twilling, which after inspection seemed far from uniform in the way it skipped over threads, but rather varied, point to point, over the given surface—an extended matrix, each of its entries a coefficient describing what was being done upon the loom . . . these thoughts had come to preoccupy her so thoroughly that it was with a bewilderment comparable to awakening from sleep to find herself and her friends abruptly at the top of the enormous Earl’s Court Wheel, three hundred feet above London, in a compartment the size of a metropolitan bus, packed in with thirty or forty other passengers, who appeared to be British holidaygoers, all busily eating sausage rolls, whelks, and pork pies by the hamperful.
“We’re not moving,” Faun muttered after a while.
“A full revolution takes twenty minutes,” advised Yashmeen. “So that each car may have its pause at the top.”
“Yes, but our car has already been here for five minutes at least—”
“It got stuck once for four hours,” announced a person of distinctly suburban aspect. “For their inconvenience my uncle and aunt, who were courting at the time, each got a five-pound note, just like in the song—so, having between them a tidy fortune, they popped into the first magistrate they could find, and did the deed. Put the money into Chinese Turkestan railway shares and never looked back.”
“Care for a nice bit of jellied eel?” one of the funseekers now wobbling a portion of the open-air snack favorite quite close to Noellyn’s face.
“I think not,” she said, about to add, “are you insane?” before recalling where they were, and how soon they were likely to be back on terra firma.
“Look, there’s West Ham!”
“There’s the Park, and Upton Lane!”
“There’s a number of lads all in claret and blue!”
“Kicking something back and forth!”
The world, since the Chicago Fair of 1893, had undergone a sudden craze for vertical rotation on the grand scale. The cycle, Yashmeen, speculated, might only seem reversible, for once to the top and down again, one would be changed “forever.” Wouldn’t one. She drifted thence into issues of modular arithmetic, and its relation to the Riemann problem, and eventually to the beginnings of a roulette system which would someday see her past landlords and sommeliers and other kinds of lupine liminality, and become the wonder and despair of casino managers across the Continent.
THE GROUP THAT GATHERED at Liverpool Street Station to see her off included Cyprian, Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun, a group of smitten young men, none of whom anyone seemed to know, and the toxically obtrusive Professor Renfrew, who presented her with a bouquet of hydrangeas. There were telegrams, including one from Hardy, whimsical to the point of unreadability, though when she was alone, she tucked it into a safe place among her luggage. The hydrangeas she threw over the side.
She would take the 8:40 boat-train, arriving at Parkeston Quay at Harwich around 10:10, and thence by steamer across the black and turbulent German Sea, waking at each great wavethump, intercepting in nameless oneiric crosstalk the fragmentary dreams of others, losing her own, forgetting all of it in the first merciless, cold striations of the dawn, as the boat raised the Hook of Holland.
“I say Cyprian you’re looking a bit green!”
“Not to mention a number of spots.”
“I believe I shall give him a squeeze just to see if he’s sound,” and a number of similar vegetable jokes, Cyprian thus providing Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun a useful distraction from their own melancholy, otherwise likely, one gathered, to be insupportable. But in the score of departure, as if in obedience to some inflexible dynamic tradition, at some point a silence had to fall.
Cyprian waited then for the terrible onset, the intestinal certainty that he would never see her again. He would then hold off the woeful relapse long enough to get back to his rooms and surrender to tears, and this would go on indefinitely, if not forever, boring everyone within several miles’ radius, squads of gyps wringing out mop after mop sort of thing—but though he waited, through that night, then the day (as her train crossed canals, passing wooded hillsides and the madhouse at Osnabrück, then at Hannover a change of trains for Göttingen), then another night and day—waited long after she had left Cambridge, in fact, but no such attack of sadness occurred, and presently he understood that some perverse variety of Fate, already familiar to him, which did not promise but rather withheld, was offering him the assurance that none of “this”—whatever it was supposed to be—was quite done with yet.
The tall black hull rose above them like a monument to the perils of the sea, no obvious connection to the waves of gaiety washing beneath it. Emptied hacks lined up four or five deep on the pier, the drivers in their shiny black plug hats waiting for the crowd to finish waving bon voyage and to turn one by one their faces inland once again, landward to the day they had taken this brief hour from.
“Only going on the road, Kate, back before you know it.”
“The latest is that your old pal R. Wilshire Vibe was kind enough to set me up with an audition, and I went, and now I just had a callback, so maybe—”
“Don’t say it! What horrible news!”
Katie flushed a little. “Well, that old R.W., he’s not so bad. . . .”
“Katie McDivott. Shocking what’s happenin to our youth ain’t it—” But the ship’s horn let loose with a bone-deep bellow that stopped all the predeparture chatter on the pier.
KATIE STAYED until the liner had backed, turned, begun to dwindle into the complications of the harbor.
She imagined hours among giant manned buoys, official boats, mid-river inspection stations. Her parents had sailed out of Cobh like everybody else, but she’d been born later, and had never been to sea. If they had been sailing into the future, toward some unknowable form of the afterlife, what was this journey of Dally’s the other way? A kind of release from death and judgment back into childhood? She twirled her parasol in thought. A hack driver or two cast an appreciative eye her way.
IT WASN’T REALLY till Erlys and Dally got well out onto the ocean that either felt permitted, as if by the non-human vastness they had entered, either to speak or to listen. They walked together slowly round the promenade deck, arm in arm, nodding to passengers now and then whose plumed hats were agitated in the ocean breeze, avoiding stewards with laden trays. . . . The smokestacks leaned upward into the wind, the antenna wires sang. . . .
“I know it must’ve come as a shock.”
“Well, yes and no. Maybe not so much.”
“Merle is still the same person, you know.”
“Yehp. Course that always was a mixed blessing.”
“Now, Dahlia—”
“And you, you sound just like him.”
Her mother was quiet for a moment. “You never know what’s going to happen. Walking back down Euclid from the cemetery with a couple dollars to my name, here came that Merle in some crazy old wagon, asked if I wanted a ride. Like he’d been waiting up that particular side street just for me to come by.”
“You’re partial to women in mourning?” Erlys couldn’t help wondering out loud then.
“It’s almost dark and you’re on foot. Was all I meant.”
You could smell crude oil in the air. The first wheelfolk of summer, in bright sweaters and caps and striped socks, went whirring gaily in battalion strength along the great viaduct on tandem bicycles, which seemed to be a city craze that year. Bicycle bells going nonstop, the massed choruses of them, in all sorts of ragged harmonies, loud as church bells on Sunday though maybe with a finer texture. Roughnecks went in and out of saloon doors and sometimes windows. Elms cast deep shade over yards and streets, forests of elms back when there were still elms in Cleveland, making visible the flow of the breezes, iron railings surrounding the villas of the well-off, roadside ditches full of white clover, a sunset that began early and stayed late, growing to a splendor that had her and Merle gazing at it in disbelief, and then at each other.
“Will you just look at that!” She trailed a black crepe sleeve across the west. “Like those sunsets when I was a kid.”
“I remember. Volcano blew up, out there in the East Indies someplace, dust and ashes stayed aloft, all the colors changed, went on for years.”
“That Krakatoa,” she nodded, as if it were some creature in a child’s story. “This ship’s cook I run with briefly, Shorty, he was there—well, a couple hundred miles downwind, not that it mattered, said it was like the end of the world.”
“I thought sunsets were just always supposed to look like that. Every kid I knew. We all believed it for a while till they started getting back to ordinary again, then we figured it was our fault, something to do with growing up, maybe everything else was supposed to fade down that way, too . . . by the time Bert asked me to marry him I wasn’t all that surprised nor disappointed to find how little I cared one way or the other. Guess that’s no way to be talking about the deceased, is it.”
“But you’re still just a kid.”
“Better get some new ‘specs’ there, old-timer.”
“Oh, feel as old as you like, o’ course.” The minute she’d settled into the seat next to him, her billowing widow’s rig had got redisposed to reveal her neatly gravid waistline, at which, now, he nodded. “How soon is she due?”
“Around the first of the year maybe. Who said it’s a girl?”
“Let’s see your hand.” She held out her hand, palm upward. “Yehp. Girl all right. Palm down, see, it’s a boy.”
“Gypsy talk. Should’ve known just from the looks of this wagon here.”
“Oh, we’ll see. Put a little money on it if you like.”
“You planning to be around that long?”
Which is how it got arranged, faster than either of them really noticed at the time. He’d never asked her what she was doing alone on foot at so awkward an hour, but she got around to telling him all the same—the faro debts, the laudanum, the laudanum with whiskey chasers, bad loans and worse creditors, Bert’s family the Snidells of Prospect Avenue, the sisters in particular, who hated the air she breathed, a list of small-town miseries magnified up to Cleveland scale that Merle must’ve run into once or twice in his rounds over the years but considerately sat and let her go over in detail, till she was calm enough not to take what he offered the wrong way.
“It ain’t a Euclid Avenue mansion, you may’ve noticed that already, but it’s warm and solid built, there’s a leaf-spring suspension of my own design that you’d think you were riding on a cloud.”
“Sure, well being an angel I’m used to that.” But the brightest part of that luridly exploding childhood sky was now right behind her face, and some of her hair was loose, and she could detect in his gaze enough of what he must be seeing, and they both fell silent.
He was renting some space over on the West Side. He heated them up a kettle of soup on a little oil stove that burned overrun from down at the Standard kerosene works. After supper they sat and looked across the Flats and watched the river reflecting the lights of steamboat traffic and gas lamps and foundry fires for miles up the twists and bends of the Cuyahoga. “It’s like looking down into the sky,” she said, drowsy with the long day.
“Best you get some shut-eye,” said Merle, “you and your friend there.”
He was right about that wagon. She recalled later sleeping there better than she ever had before, maybe since. The weather was still merciful enough that Merle could sleep outside, in a bedroll under a waterproof up on sticks, though some nights he went into town to raise some species of hell she didn’t inquire into, and he didn’t come back till well after sunup . . . as fall started to creep in, they headed south, on down through Kentucky and into Tennessee, keeping ahead of the changing year, staying in towns she’d never heard of, always with somebody he knew, some brother craftsman to steer him to where there was work, which might be just about anything from running trolley cable to putting in a well, and soon as she got comfortable with the likelihood that even in hard times there would somehow be work, she could sit more quietly, just let her worries slide away somewhere else, pay full attention to this baby on the way, understanding one day so clearly, “That of course it would be not just ‘a girl’ but you, Dally, I dreamed about you, night after night, I dreamed your little face, your exact face, and when you were out in the world at last, I sure did know you, you were the baby of those dreams. . . .”
With exaggerated patience, after a moment of thought, “Yehp but then the next part is, first chance you get, you just—”
“No. No, Dally, I was going to come back and get you. I thought I’d have time, but it seemed like Merle didn’t wait, just took off with you, no word of where to.”
“All his fault, huh.”
“No, Luca was dragging his feet too . . . kept saying, ‘Yes, we could do that,’ not ‘We will’ but—”
“Oh, so it was all his fault.”
A narrow smile and headshake. “No mercy, no mercy, not this one.”
The girl beamed at her falsely, but feeling no more malicious than that, allowing Erlys do the work of reckoning up what her child could still not forgive.
“I won’t try to fool you. Luca Zombini when he came along was the first real passion of my life—how was I going to say no to that? With Merle, yes, moments of desire had ambushed us, even though he was, to be fair about it, what you’d call reluctant to press his case on a pregnant young widow, not so much out of courtliness as past experience—more or less bitter would be my guess.”
“So you and Luca went wi
ld the minute you laid eyes on each other.”
“Still do, for that matter—”
“What. You two—”
“Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm,” Erlys, with a disarming deep gaze, sang in a descending minor triad more or less.
“And little babies tend to put the kibosh on that sort of thing, I’ll bet.”
“Except that, as we began to find out all too soon, it didn’t. And I was missing you more and more with the years slipping by one by one, those brothers and sisters you should’ve had all around you, and I was so frightened—”
“What of?”
“You, Dahlia. I couldn’t have borne it if—”
“Please. What was I gonna do, pull out a pistol?”
“Oh, my baby.” Dally was not ready for the choked-up treble she heard then, and what it seemed to betray—better late than never, Dally supposed—of self-reproach, maybe even sorrow. “You know you can have anything from me you want, I’m in no position—”
“I know. But Merle told me I couldn’t take advantage. Is why I was never fixin to do more than drop in, say hello, be on my way again.”
“Sure. Get me back for leaving you the way I did. Oh, Dally.”
The girl shrugged, head angled downward, hair brushing forward along her cheeks. “Turned out to be all different anyhow.”
“Worse than you thought.”
“You know, I was expecting . . . some kind of a Svengali? customer in a cape, with you all sap-headed under his hypnotic spell and—”
“Luca?” Dally had known her mother to chuckle, but not to make a spectacle of herself. Passersby actually turned and promenaded backward for a while just to take it in. When Erlys could catch her breath, “Now I’m embarrassing you, Dally.”
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