by Tom Murphy
Finally the great rip was sewn. Lily draped the gown over the back of the chair and scrutinized her work. The pattern of the tear was visible, but only barely, and her stitches were so fine that they all but vanished into the heavy satin. And the skirt draped well. When the fringe was applied, the repair should be undetectable. She rubbed her cramped fingers and began basting the fringe in an attractive sweep. Then she matched the concealing fringe with another sweep on the opposite side of the skirt. There! It was really almost an improvement, considering the gaudy nature of the gown, which was nearly as overfurnished with draperies and decorations as Mrs. Dickinson’s drawing room.
Lily sat and began sewing the fringe into place with careful, undetectable little stitches. She squinted. Her fingers passed the point of aching and became numb extensions of an indefatigable will. The dress would be done and delivered by noon. Mrs. Dickinson would learn what skill and dedication could do. Lily pricked a finger, swore silently, for the baby was sleeping, and managed to catch the drop of blood before it soiled the satin.
The black night was fading into pale dawn when Lily cut the last thread, tied the last knot, and finally draped the gown over the chair again. She was almost too sleepy to see, but the gown was finished and it looked splendid. Yawning, Lily splashed a little water on her face and dragged herself to bed.
Lily woke to a bright, clear day. Her fingers ached and her eyes felt sore, but in her heart was the warm glow of achievement. How many girls in San Francisco could have done the job so well, and so quickly? It was worth much more than five dollars. Lily knew that, and so must Mrs. Dickinson. Maybe the woman would see reason. Surely she’d see that the job was expertly done, and Lily worthy of more work.
If she could earn just ten dollars a day, she and Kate could survive!
Lily half-sang, half-hummed a little tune as she dressed and refolded the gown. She fed the baby, took a sip of milk for herself, and half a stale roll, and set out briskly on foot for the mansion on Rincon Hill.
The walk took nearly an hour. Once again Lily rang the bell, and was admitted by a servant. Mamie Dickinson was wearing an afternoon gown only slightly less elaborate than the ball gown that Lily had spent the night mending. Lily found herself greeted with a glare.
“Your gown, ma’am. And a bit of the fringe that was left over, and the thread, should it ever need mending again.”
Without so much as glancing at the gown, Mamie Dickinson spoke in a voice that was very like a snarl. “You sly little thief! To have the brass to demand carfare from me, and get it, and steal it!”
Lily was shocked to her toes. For a moment she stood, dumbstruck.
“I…”
“Did you or did you not take money from me in this very room, yesterday, and then keep it for yourself?”
Lily felt her head spinning. What could she say? It was true. She had kept the carfare for herself—for Kate. How did the woman know? And why did she care? Fifty cents to her, a millionairess?
The rasping voice went on. “Don’t try to worm out of it. You were followed, sly vixen that you are. You don’t suppose I’d let a stranger walk away with a gown worth thousands of dollars? Well, it’s lucky for you, Miss whatever-your-name-is, that you got yourself back here with the gown, or I’d have you jailed. I may do that yet.”
Rage flowed through Lily like a flood tide. “All night I stayed up sewing your gown, Mrs. Dickinson. If you want your carfare back, I’ll give it to you, out of my pay. I am not a thief.”
Mamie Dickinson laughed. The wattled turkey’s throat stretched back and the chinless mouth opened wide. Her laugh was jagged, the sound of cheap glass breaking.
“You don’t imagine I intend to pay you, thief that you are? And a liar to boot. Better you take yourself out of here, you wicked girl, and thank the good Lord that I don’t have the police on you, for I easily could.”
Lily felt hot very suddenly, then cold. She actually shivered, standing before Mamie Dickinson, trembling, desolated beyond words. Beyond anger. This must be what dying feels like.
Slowly, still trembling, Lily turned. It was like learning to walk all over again. She put one foot in front of the other and made her way across the rich carpet, hardly able to comprehend what was happening.
If a mule had kicked her in the head, Lily could hardly have been more stunned, more profoundly hurt. Without a word, but with Mamie Dickinson’s horrible laugh echoing in her heart, Lily somehow got herself out of the house and down the wide front steps to the street.
Back inside, Mamie Dickinson unfolded the dress, spread it out on a settee, and smiled. You’d have to get up pretty early to put one over on Mamie Dickinson.
24
Of all the many and luxurious wedding presents that had come to the newlywed Mr. and Mrs. Brooks Chaffee, Brooks best liked the simple Greek Revival brick house his father had bought for them on West Eleventh Street, just off Fifth Avenue. It wasn’t as big or as elaborate as the senior Chaffees’ establishment on Washington Square, but the clean lines of the house and its beautiful proportions from within were pleasing: chaste black marble fireplaces in the twin parlors, tall windows framed in flat pilasters, gleaming walnut doors, ceilings high but unadorned.
Caroline, of course, wanted to add an iron balcony in the Gothic style that was suddenly so fashionable, and on that issue Brooks refused her for the first time in their short marriage. She took it in good grace, as Caroline took everything, and contented herself with redoing the interior in the height of style, using influences she’d picked up on their honeymoon in Europe.
How Brooks wished that lovely adventure could go on forever and ever!
But they were back now, three months away was quite long enough, and Brooks was eager as any sapling tree to settle in and put down roots. He had always known his future would be here, in New York, in his father’s law firm or his uncle’s bank. There had always been such a depth of comfort in the Chaffee household, and so little talk about money—for to talk about money was considered vulgar—that Brooks was only vaguely aware of the world of finance. And the more he found out, the more it fascinated him. By the time they’d landed in New York again, Brooks was determined to seek a position in his uncle’s investment-banking firm. And now, three months later, in the bright blue of October, Brooks was the most industrious young clerk in the well-known firm of Chaffee, Hudner & Zuydam.
Caroline, to her husband’s surprise, had been opposed to his taking a job of any kind.
“In the South, a young man in your circumstances would not dream of workin’ in some tacky old office every day. He’d be out with his horses, or shootin’, or things like that.”
Brooks laughed. “Yes, my love, and look at the South, the condition it’s in. Your young man would also have hundreds of slaves, I’m sure, and a vast inherited fortune, or a great plantation.”
“You have a fortune.”
“Only grandmother’s trust, and the generosity of my father. I’m not truly rich, not yet anyway.”
“Well, Brooks Chaffee, I must declare I do not understand you Northerners. You are positively fanatical.”
“I am,” he said kissing her, laughing still, “fanatical about one thing, darling, and that is my beautiful bride.” And the discussion ended in their big old mahogany four-poster bed, where more and more of such discussions seemed to end these days. Brooks could find nothing to complain about in that. Caroline’s healthy response to his lovemaking was a source of deep pleasure and infinite delight to him. If more women were as warm and loving to their husbands, he often thought, there would be far fewer husbands sneaking off to the sporting palaces of Manhattan.
Yet as Brooks became more and more involved with the burgeoning affairs of Chaffee, Hudner, it became increasingly obvious that Caroline’s primary interest was the pursuit of pleasure: not only sexual gratification, but social pleasures of all kinds. Caroline quickly became one of the more popular young hostesses of the city. With her beauty and charm and breeding, combined with the
hitherto unapproachable cachet of the ancient Chaffee name and connections, an invitation to dine with Brooks and Caroline was very close to irresistible.
And the entertainment she provided to those who accepted was remarkable.
In a city noted for its vulgarity and excesses, Caroline Ledoux Chaffee had the wit and imagination to be different. While other hostesses in her set might fill a room with a thousand dollars’ worth of flowers, Caroline made people gasp by floating one perfect gardenia in one small crystal bowl in front of each guest’s plate. She was the first to give an Oriental banquet, the first to have a Spanish gypsy guitarist instead of the usual stuffy string ensemble playing at supper, the first to give a midnight picnic on a chartered sailing boat that ghosted up the Hudson propelled by champagne and laughter.
Life with Caroline became a gilded whirl, and when the money he gave her as a household allowance ran out, Caroline simply used her own and never mentioned it. The important thing was to keep the carousel turning, and while Brooks had never found the social life either very amusing or very necessary, she did, and therefore he indulged her. After all, it kept her busy, it gave many people pleasure, and so why question it?
In the meantime, the year ground remorselessly on, with the slavery issue growing ever more flammable. The newly settled Midwestern states were tearing themselves virtually to shreds over the issue. Kansas, after months of bloody debate, voted Free. Minnesota, which no one had even heard of five years earlier, suddenly had a population of more than 150,000 and was agitating for statehood and against slavery. Brooks could see the tension building, the relations with the Deep South growing more strained every day until, sure as sunrise, someday soon, the strain would reach the breaking point.
He remembered the soft days and long nights of his wedding celebrations in New Orleans, and wondered if that style of almost ducal splendor could sustain itself much longer. He thought not.
Caroline, meanwhile, was entrenching herself as the belle of New York. Precisely how she spent her daytime hours, Brooks never knew, nor did he bother to ask. She was a wonder, forever in motion, organizing parties or going to them, shopping, decorating, doing the thousand sweet female things that her sex and position in the world made her heiress to, and doing these things so very well that to many of the bored postdebutante set in Manhattan, life without Caroline Chaffee began to seem boring, insupportable, unthinkable. Their little argument in London, over Marianne Wallingford’s lover, had faded so completely that it might never have happened.
Brooks, to whom preeminence in society had arrived with his first diaper, was less aware of the speed and scope of her triumph than more distant observers. As ever, Caroline caused a wagging of tongues, a looking-down of noses, for Caroline was irreverent, very sure of what Caroline wanted and to hell with everyone else, and not afraid to show it or say it. It was a matter of months before she had the brightest and most decorative members of the fast young set in town all but eating out of her small, white, fine-skinned hand.
Brooks knew that his older brother, Neddy, was one of the frowners and disapprovers, and this disturbed him, for he loved Neddy. They never talked about Caroline these days, because Brooks sensed that to do that might create an open unpleasantness between them, and there was a great deal that Brooks Chaffee would do to avoid that.
So Neddy became less and less a part of their lives. The elder Chaffees, too, were less and less in evidence at West Eleventh Street. The social duties were well and regularly performed, but beyond that there was little communication. Brooks’s mother, always a quiet woman, grew even more inward in the glowing, bubbling presence of the dynamic Caroline. And his father simply didn’t care for parties.
As October danced and sparkled toward deep fall, and the New York social scene cranked itself up for yet another merry winter, Brooks sometimes wondered if he’d had a life at all before Caroline. Maybe, but it had been a nursery kind of life, only dimly remembered.
One person still much in evidence from that past life was Jack Wallingford.
It was terrible to see what the Wallingfords’ bankruptcy had done to Jack. Jack, who had always been such a good sport, unfailingly generous, always ready to laugh, to set up some fun, had become a kind of dark memory of his former self. He had always been a drinker. Now the drinking had a desperate edge on it, as if Jack could see his death in every glass, and didn’t care. His laughter had an unwelcome edge to it these days, too. Jack mocked everything, including himself. Leaving New Haven, as he’d been forced to do, was no sacrifice for Jack. But the shabby boardinghouse he shared with his parents, just off Lexington Avenue in the Twenties, was an insistent reminder of how far and how suddenly they had fallen.
In the past, Jack’s inconsistencies had seemed charming whims. Now he merely appeared unreliable. Jack might or might not respond to a written invitation, and, having accepted, he might or might not show up. And if he showed up, he might or might not be sober. Brooks and Caroline fed him, joked with him, tolerated him. After all, Brooks often reminded himself, hadn’t it been Jack who first introduced him to Caroline?
One night Brooks came home late from the office and found his house glittering with light and ringing with laughter. Blushing, he hung up his coat and entered the drawing room. He had forgotten that Caroline was having another of her little supper parties. He looked around the pretty room and wished she had chosen some other night. Then he saw Caroline and, as always, melted. There were women in the room, but she was surrounded by three men. One of them was Jack, and from long experience Brooks could tell that his old friend was far from sober. He kissed his wife, shook hands with the men, clapped Jack on the shoulder.
“It’s good to see you, Jack.”
Wallingford grinned, and in the flash of his smile Brooks could almost imagine they were boys again, and about to set off on some grand adventure. But then, quick as it came, his friend’s mood changed and darkened. Jack’s hot, dark eyes burned into his own eyes, and their intensity was such that Brooks soon looked away. There was a plea in Jack’s gaze, and a kind of desperation. He was far out on some bleak edge of despair, maybe beyond reach. Brooks thought of the old days, and determined to try. He led Jack out of the little group and up the stairs to the library.
“Is something the matter, old friend?” Jack’s reply was a harsh laugh. Then he spoke, slowly, as if from some faraway place.
“It does my heart good to see you and the lady, indeed it does, for seldom in this vale of tears does one get the chance to glimpse perfection.”
“We are far from perfect, as well you know.”
“Ah, say it not! To the world’s eyes, you are perfection. You glitter with it, inside and out. So young, so fair, so brimming with luck. Say, you don’t keep any brandy up here, by any chance?”
“I’ll ring for some.”
“No, don’t bother. I’ve had more than my share, as you may have noticed. I shall just bask in the reflected glow of your happiness, then slink off to my usual low haunts.”
Brooks looked at his friend and felt a sense of helplessness choking the very breath out of him.
“If there is anything I can do, just tell me.”
“Ever kind. Ever considerate, a compendium of all the virtues. I love you, Brooks, truly I do. But no, the only help that could be given me is long past the reach of God or man, for it would mean inserting a new heart, new soul…new hope. And it’s too late in the game for that, I fear.”
“You don’t mean it.”
“But I do. Now…shall we rejoin the ladies?” They walked down the blue-carpeted staircase into a hall filled with light and laughter.
Lily made her way down Rincon Hill, past the opulent houses of the rich, past fanciful iron fences and elaborately planted flower gardens struggling to take root in what just a few years ago had been sand dunes.
She felt like a ghost, so remote was she from this world of wealth and servants and never a care about whether you’d have enough to eat tomorrow. Or today.
> Lily’s mind was hardly able to accept what Mrs. Dickinson had said and done. Maybe it had been wrong not to take the tram. But surely buying food for her baby counted more than that small scruple.
Lily felt as though something dirty, something contaminating had happened to her in that house. She breathed deeply, and tried to organize her thoughts. She could feel a pang of hunger deep in her belly, for it was well past noon now, and she’d had only a sip and a bite for breakfast.
At the bottom of the hill was a small greengrocer’s. Lily paused, tempted. Thirty cents for one apple, and not a very fine one at that! She looked at the apple, unimaginable luxury. A quart of milk could be bought for that much: enough to last Kate one day. What a fine thing it must be, to be a farmer. With peace and quiet and green all around you, and always, always enough to eat.
Lily stared at the display of fruits and vegetables like a woman obsessed. It was a meager showing. She felt herself sinking. And maybe it would have been all for the best if the Eurydice had sunk in that gale!
Lily turned quickly from the counter and walked on, unseeing, beyond tears.
The first street she came to was named Folsom, first of some twenty blocks she’d have to walk, and many of those uphill.
Lily stepped into the dry dirt road, lost in the depths of her troubles and only vaguely aware of a building thunder coming closer and louder. She never saw the stampeding carriage.
Suddenly there was a shout and a roaring and a clatter of hooves. Strong arms locked around Lily and dragged her back and downward.
“Whoa, there, lady!”
She was sitting in the dust and a tall stranger knelt in the road beside her, fanning her with a clean handkerchief, offering her water from a copper ladle.