by Tom Murphy
He’d left her very much to herself in the hotel these last two days. Lily was grateful for that, even as she wondered about it. Maybe that last time in his room at the Fifth Avenue house would be truly the last time they made love. Forever. Lily was fond of Jack, but she did not regret him, either. Close as he was, Jack seemed already a part of her past.
Jack, she was sure, had many sources of consolation if what he wanted was a tumble in the hay. “A man loses the world when he loses you, Lily.” Sure and he’d said that, but what had he meant? He’d also made it very clear there was no question—none in the world—of his marrying her. Absolutely unsuitable. Lily was the first to realize that, and she had always realized it. But knowing a thing was different from being told it to your face, and the hurt of that was with her still, even though he’d also said those other things, even though he was surely treating her generously. Lily walked up Broadway, too thrifty still to take a cab. She had purchases to make at the Wallingford Emporium, for her sense of fair play told her if she was being the beneficiary of Wallingford largess, she might at the very least spend some of it in their store.
The Emporium was huge. It filled an entire block, a five-story white limestone mercantile palace all columns and arches on the outside, brilliant with gas chandeliers within, and sparkling mirrors, polished walnut display cases set with glass that had been cut and beveled like diamonds, potted palms sprouting in this eternal June, gilding and brass and wine-red carpeting on all the corridors.
But the splendors of the building took second place to the treasures it contained. Here were bolts of fabric from France and England, and Oriental silks, lace from Belgium and Venice, cretonnes and taffetas, tweeds and gauzy fairy fabrics such as Lily had scarcely imagined. Here you could buy a spool of thread for a penny, or a gold-embroidered Persian shawl for a thousand dollars. Here were ready-made gowns based on the very latest Paris styles, hats by the score that seemed to have depleted entire jungles of all their finest feathers, gardens of silk flowers, rare porcelains, jewels, preserved delicacies to eat, and here, too, were humbler things, simple cotton dresses such as a Mrs. Groome or even Lily herself might wear. All under the one glorious roof, and all for sale, and bringing the crowds in every day by the thousands.
No wonder the Wallingfords were rich as kings and emperors! The people were as various as the things they’d come to buy, and for a few minutes Lily simply stood quietly in a corner, half-hidden by a palm tree, at ease with herself and enjoying the free social circus that was the steady parade of shoppers. She saw servants and shopgirls, dowagers that she recognized from having served them in Mrs. Wallingford’s green-walled boudoir, idle young men in pairs, come to leer at the young women and possibly to make acquaintance of them, beggars, street boys who were likely as not out to grab and run, to snatch some resalable bauble from the open counters. There was a smattering of foreign visitors, French and English and German, for this was one of New York’s great attractions and everybody came.
Lily stayed five minutes near her palm.
Then a well-remembered voice curled around her like a noose. It was Brooks Chaffee’s.
Lily froze, shrank into her coat, cringed beneath her wide-brimmed bonnet, hoped against every hope he wouldn’t see her.
But Brooks Chaffee had no eyes for Lily, nor for anyone else in all the world but the girl who walked beside him, her fawn-gloved hand resting lightly upon his arm with the imperial grace of one born to rule the hearts of men forever.
Caroline Ledoux was shopping for a reticule.
At first Lily hardly noticed the girl. She saw Brooks, and it was the first time in more than a year that she’d seen him. He looked older, less a boy, more a man, taller perhaps, more beautiful than ever. No man has a right to look like that: it’s a pure danger. He wore a light overcoat of dark blue, and the dark gold hair gleamed with a dull radiance in the lamplight of Wallingford’s Emporium. As usual, Brooks went hatless. Lily heard the laugh, saw his light head bend close to the girl’s dark head, heard them both laugh, and then they were gone in a flutter of shoppers, gone around a mirrored pillar, gone from Lily’s sight but forever fixed in her memory.
She turned quickly and walked to the street exit of the great store just as fast as she could without actually running. Lily’s loyalty to the Wallingfords’ generosity did not extend so far as having her heart broken right there in their store. She’d buy her yard goods elsewhere.
Brooks felt the touch of Caroline’s hand on his arm. It was a small hand, her touch was light as a butterfly’s touch, but nevertheless it warmed him all through, from the flush mounting on his cheeks to the toes wrapped in stout English leather. Caroline had more moods than the wind, more currents than all the rivers on earth. It was the mystery and the changes in her that held his attention, almost as much as her beauty and his very fundamental physical desire for her.
Today she was being playful. Tonight she might be a philosopher, tomorrow a child, the next day a hussy. It was all done with a light touch, for Caroline’s mind was a quick skimming thing, elusive as rainbows, and the brightness of it was always edged in a kind of warm darkness that Brooks did not truly understand except for the fact that it made him love her even more, and more urgently.
“…but, Mr. Chaffee,” she continued, “you must perceive that buyin’ a reticule is a matter of the highest importance. Why, when the Democratic party nominates Mr. James Buchanan for President, as my daddy insists they must do, I do daresay less thought will have gone into that selection than I give to a reticule.”
“I’m perfectly sure of it.” He laughed then, and she with him, and they swept past a potted palm tree and around a corner to the section of the store where the best reticules were displayed.
Was it just three months since he’d met her? It seemed to Brooks that he had only just been born that winter night in old Mrs. Vanderbilt’s house, the night he’d first set eyes on Caroline Ledoux. And all the other girls he’d known, and liked, and tried to love, all those girls faded gently into some misty half-forgotten time, the time he now thought of as his childhood, the time before life became worth living. The time before Caroline.
His life, Brooks knew all too well, had always been a very safe, well-insulated life. And what struck him instantly in Caroline was that she was absolutely fearless. If there was a chance to be taken, this sweet girl would take it, laughing, just for the fun to be had. Harmless fun, of course, but fun and in plenty.
Many were the dowagers whose long disapproving noses had been twitted out of joint because the mischievous Caroline would not dance to their pompous tunes. Caroline was frankly a flirt, and she said that in New Orleans flirting was an ancient and respected art, even old grandmothers did it, if they could carry the thing off, and many could.
“Now, you wouldn’t want me sitting all plain and prune-faced in some corner, pretendin’ life’s no fun, would you, Mr. Chaffee?”
And Brooks had to admit that was the very last thing he would want.
“You Yankees are charmin’ in many ways, but this is a cold, cold place, your old Northern states, and what you need, if I do say so myself, is a little flirtin’ and a bit of moonshine and violins playin’ someplace yonder, hearts beatin’ faster than they should…and the flowers. The perfume of flowers. These Yankee flowers have no soul to them, they spend all their lives in some glass house and they just don’t smell right, leastways not to this simple Southern girl.”
Brooks looked at her, enchanted. He had never seen a girl like Caroline, nor heard such talk. This elusive little creature could make his soul jump through hoops, make his pulse dance on the high wire, make his yearning heart pound like galloping hoofbeats. Brooks felt young, shy, cold, hot, afraid, and fearless in turn. For the first time in his life he felt ill-at-ease, worried about doing or saying the wrong thing, and what he did manage to say sounded coarse and stupid to his ears by contrast to the capricious and altogether dazzling wit that came bubbling so effortlessly out of Caroline.
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br /> “You think,” he said, grinning like a fool, “of yourself as simple?”
“Why, I hardly think of myself at all, and that’s the truth.”
“All New York is thinking of you, Caroline.”
“Just goes to show how very little is on your old Yankee minds, then, if a bitty thing like me can make an impression.”
Brooks’s mind raced and turned and darted this way and that as he desperately sought the magic formula that would bind her to him forever. For, lovely as she undeniably was, and yearn for her as he did, with his body in eager partnership with his heart and soul, there remained something wild and ephemeral about Caroline, as though she were some exotic bird who might, at the slightest provocation, fly away to the mysterious land that had bred her, leaving only a memory and a legend.
“Down home,” she replied with a ripple of laughter, “I come by the dozens, like spoons!”
“Then I am emigrating tomorrow.”
“Ah, no, Mr. Chaffee: stay where you are. Some fine plants just wither and die when you transplant ’em.”
“I’ll only stay, Caroline, if you’d stay with me.”
Brooks took a deep breath as he said these words, for they were a commitment, and although he hadn’t devised a formal strategy about the time and place of his proposal, he was sure in his heart that the proposal would come in its own time, and if that time was now, so much the better, to have stumbled into the dangerous, uncharted forest all at once, without formal preparations.
Caroline Ledoux looked up at him then, and something flickered across her immense brown eyes. It was a fleeting thing, the reflection of windblown clouds on the surface of a dark pool, a brief restless shimmering that gave no clue to what caused it, nor to what might lie in the depths of that pool. She spoke softly. “I declare, Mr. Chaffee, now you are simply flirtin’, too. It must be contagious, like the fever.”
She laughed, and her laugh held a challenge.
Brooks took her hand and prayed to God she wouldn’t laugh at what he was about to say. “The fact is, Caroline, that I love you.”
She took his hand then, and gave it a little squeeze, but the laughter stopped. “Lordy, this shoppin’ for a reticule surely is a serious business. You take me quite aback, Mr. Chaffee.”
“Brooks.”
“Brooks, then. You aren’t triflin’ with my affections, Brooks Chaffee?”
“I would die first.”
“I do think you would.”
“Can you give me hope?”
“Hope is a very portable commodity, Brooks Chaffee. The question seems to be, can I give you the heart of Miss Caroline Ledoux?”
“I would be happier than any man on earth if you could.”
“I do flirt, Mr. Chaffee, as you know, and I mean no harm by it, it’s one of our native customs, you see, like the changin’ of the guard at Buckingham Palace. I take it you are askin’ me to marry you?”
“Will you…could you?”
“Right here in Wallingford’s? Don’t you think that would be a trifle public?”
She laughed again, ripples and ripples of it. Brooks thought that he had never heard a more painful sound. The light inflections of her laughter seemed to be ripping his guts out, and slowly, as with a dull knife.
“Refuse me if you must, Caroline, but please don’t mock me.”
Again he felt the pressure of her hand, the lightest pressure, but as effective as any blow with a hammer. And he looked into her eyes and found them fixed on his, and the laughter died then. They stayed like that for a moment, people swirling and jostling all around them, stayed transfixed like statues before the best reticule counter at Wallingford’s, and then her expression changed from something solemn to a slow warming smile. And Brooks knew in that instant that he had won this strange and exotic creature, this beautiful Caroline who was so many different Carolines, all in one and—now—all his.
They said nothing, for there was nothing to say.
Slowly, still hand in hand, they turned and made their way through the throngs of shoppers and out onto the street, all thought of the reticule vanished in the wonder of this discovery of each other.
Lily’s head was full of lists, and she recited them to herself now, hurrying up Broadway away from Wallingford’s Emporium, to keep herself from crying in her embarrassment, to keep herself from going mad. The voyage would be a long one, and tedious. The eighty-nine-day record of the Flying Cloud had been accomplished under the best of weather and with no passengers. Four months was the standard reckoning for the trip under reasonably good conditions. Four months away from cities, away from shops, away from everything but the sea and the sky and the other passengers, whoever they might be! And away from her past, and away from Brooks Chaffee.
Lily was bringing books, a grammar and some novels and a Bible, for she meant to study and improve her reading on the voyage. And she was bringing the materials of a new wardrobe, too, on top of the ready-made clothes she’d bought already. Everything cost the earth in San Francisco, she’d heard, and Lily intended to make Jack’s thousand dollars last just as long as it could out there. So she would have dressmaking materials for herself and for the baby. Louise had taught her to knit and crochet, and Lily intended to do that, too. And aside from work materials and books, there were extra provisions to buy. Jack had been firm about that. The clipper provided all meals, and they were supposed to be good meals at that. But unexpected delays might occur, and it never hurt to have things like potted meats and raisins and other dried fruits, pickles and candied orange peel and ginger root, sassafras and spices, herbal wines, balms and lotions. There seemed no end to it, but the end was indeed in four days, for today was Saturday and they were sailing on Wednesday!
Well, then. It was nearly all done. The foodstuffs and medicines were bought and crated, her clothing packed, the books bought. All Lily needed was cloth to sew and patterns to cut from. She’d bought a fine new sewing kit at Wallingford’s, fitted with scissors and pinking shears and a hundred needles, twin thimbles, and many kinds of thread.
So Lily’s mind was busy as she made her way up the crowded street. She’d stop at Stewart’s then, the Wallingford store being temporarily out of the question. The bright April afternoon suddenly seemed to have a chill on it. Lily had been feeling much better in this, the second month of her pregnancy. The morning sickness had left her, and she went about the hundred chores of packing with new energy.
Lily’s life had changed so fast it made her dizzy.
She alternated between making long, thoughtful plans for the future and impetuous moments when she decided there was no controlling fate, and why bother, since her plans and dreams had such a fatal habit of turning out differently from her expectations?
She found herself pausing on the street now and again, in the late afternoon, and looking at the sun as it slowly rolled toward the west, thinking that where the sun was going she soon would be, and all her hopes and dreams, whatever they amounted to. The shock and shame of her pregnancy had slowly evolved into something close to happiness. It might not be the kind of change she would have wished for first, if by some magic she were given her choice of all the wishes in the world, but surely it was a change, a fresh start, and she was glad of it. And Lily was glad of the baby too, for the baby would give a shape to her life, and around the baby she would build a better life than she or Fergy had ever known, or she’d die trying.
Suddenly, it was Tuesday afternoon. Lily finished her packing and stood up to make some tea. There was a scuffling sound outside the door, which caused her to look up in some alarm, for it sounded as though someone was trying to force his way in. Then the door was flung open and Jack Wallingford came stumbling, lurching in, obviously very drunk. Lily looked at her benefactor calmly, for hadn’t she seen him this way many times, though never so early in the day? How sad it is, for now I won’t be able to thank him properly, he’d barely hear me.
Jack stumbled into the room, looked about in wonderment as if he
didn’t know where he was. He smiled, a loose, slippery smile that soon faded.
In the short time that Lily had known Jack intimately and been his lover, she had come to recognize his many fleeting moods the way a good sailor gets to know shifting sandbars or a tricky current. For Jack was never the same man two days—or two hours—in a row. He could be all charm and thoughtfulness in one moment and wildly gay in the next, and skid from these golden heights to the very pit of despair in a swoop so sudden and so completely without warning that it was a frightening thing to behold. And the drinking only made his depressions that much worse.
Sure and he’d been drinking that first night, the night he’d taken her to bed for the first time, drinking and despondent over Miss Marianne’s betrothal to the baron. Jack sometimes drank in festive moods, too, but not like this. Not to lose control.
“Sorry,” he said, lurching past her to the love seat.
He sat down heavily, not having so much as taken off his greatcoat, and stared at his boots.
“Sorry,” he repeated, as though he’d never said it to begin with. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“What are you so sorry for, Jack? Surely not for me. I’m fine.”
He looked at her then for the first time. His dark hair, uncombed, fell in tatters across his forehead. His eyes, dark at their brightest, had gone coal-black, black as graves, black as the door of hell. A kind of grin found its way to his lips. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. It was as though he were trying to shut out some terrible vision that would not go away.
“Fine,” he said softly, sighing as he muttered the words, “fine is what you are, Lily, and truly so. One of the few fine sights upon a very dark horizon, you are, and always will be.”